I think demo discs are pretty cool. As I mentioned in a previous entry, they gave us an opportunity to play a game before it was released, as well as give us other useful tidbits and secrets. While high speed internet has pretty much made the demo disc obsolete, I still hold a fondness for them.
Here are most of the demo discs I own:
To me, demo discs are a great snapshot of the video games of old to me. They give people a chance to gleam into what gaming was like in that time period. For instance, look at this menu of a PC Gamer demo disc circa late 1999:
The main menu, as well as some of the pages, have those remnants of late ’90s web design. Completely animated, with varied fonts, a somewhat confusing web interface, even animations everywhere.
On this specific disc, there’s even a gallery of really bad photoshops of former PC Gamer mascot Coconut Monkey in there just to drive it home that this is a byproduct of late 1990s PC gaming culture.
It’s more prevalent in older demo discs than in newer ones, but sometimes you would find modifications or additional levels to add on to your games. For example, the PC Gamer disc above featured above has USS Darkstar, a Half-Life mod made by future They Hunger mod designer Neil Manke; A custom level for Duke Nukem 3D, which I didn’t know people were still making by 1999; and an Unreal map called “DM-TittyTwister.” Hey, I didn’t say all of these were gems.
In some cases, demo discs had demos to games that didn’t get released, or got heavily modified from their eventual release. Early PlayStation Jampack discs would sometimes highlight an import game straight from Japan, which was pretty cool at the time for that was a peek into gaming outside western territories. Sometimes they even made special demos of games, like a Christmas-themed edition of Toy Commander that was bundled in an issue of Official Dreamcast Magazine.
The absolute highlights of my collection are those PS2-exclusive demo discs. Sony seemed to do this a lot during the PS2 era, giving out these demo discs like they were candy. I got each of those demo discs by different means. For instance, I got Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain by being part of a minor viral ad campaign involving several different websites where you’d input codes and unlock goodies, including wallpapers and the aforementioned demo. Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror and Hot Shots Tennis were discs I got back when I was in the Gamer Advisory Panel, before Sony realized that a PlayStation Blog was a more reliable way to get your praise from diehard Sony fans.
Someday, I may cover some more of these demo discs. This would be more for historical reasons than anything practical, especially since about 90% of the demos you can freely access on the internet.
I like demo discs because you never know what you might find on them. For example, one of my finds on a different PC Gamer disc was a video of editor Norman Chan, now a host and personality at Adam Savage’s Tested, promoting Comcast high-speed internet, at a whopping 8mbps download speed! EIGHT! That was pretty impressive back then.
(UPDATE 4/10/2019: Adjusted the post in several spots. One of these days I’ll give a better compilation.)