Shareware Heroes

The Renegades Who Redefined Gaming at the Dawn of the Internet

By: Richard Moss

Narrated by: Richard Moss

Shareware Heroes is a comprehensive, meticulously researched exploration of an important and too-long overlooked chapter in video game history

Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet takes listeners on a journey, from the beginnings of the shareware model in the early 1980s, the origins of the concept, even the name itself, and the rise of shareware's major players—the likes of id Software, Apogee, and Epic MegaGames—through to the significance of shareware for the "forgotten" systems—the Mac, Atari ST, Amiga—when commercial game publishers turned away from them.

This book also charts the emergence of commercial shareware distributors like Educorp and the BBS/newsgroup sharing culture. And it explores how shareware developers plugged gaps in the video gaming market by creating games in niche and neglected genres like vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-ups (e.g. Raptor and Tyrian), or racing games (e.g. Wacky Wheels and Skunny Kart), or RPGs (God of Thunder and Realmz), until finally, as the video game market again grew and shifted, and major publishers took control, how the shareware system faded into the background and fell from memory.

©2022 Richard Moss (P)2023 Tantor

Hire Voice Actor

This is just a customer reminder that if you are doing audio book narration and you have little to no experience with speaking or performance, just hire a voice actor. Every time I hear that the book is narrated by the author, I say "oh no" - it's so rare for that to turn out well.

And in this situation I feel like the narration did the contents a great disservice. The voice is dulcet and gentle, so you want to like them, but then you have trouble understanding, get stuck on weird voice quirks, and worse, sometimes you hear a different take of the same line right after one another. Sometimes the voice sounds confused, like it's asking you if the information is correct.

The content is well done, if organized a little odd. It lacks narrative flow, but you can treat it more as an encyclopedia than a story. But because of the narration, I found my mind wandering or distracted by the voice itself.

I only recommend the written version, and would recommend checking this out if a voice actor ever steps up the plate.

Narration is hard to stomach

I hard a very difficult time understanding the narrator. "Beta" was pronounced "beet-uh" for instance. I had to really concentrate to understand the narration, which just isn't going to work for an audiobook. Maybe the Kindle version is better.