Disclaimer: There are links to external sites and programs in this article. Most of them require at least a little technical knowledge or some research. The links are provided with no warranty whatsoever; if you have problems or need support, neither the author (Jim Cook) nor GDN can help you. You download these programs at your own risk. Though if you drop a note in the forums someone might be able to help.

With 3D Realms effectively dead, it’s easy to mock them; they managed to waste over a decade hyping up a single game, and had nothing to show for it in the end. But this shouldn’t be their only legacy; they had several amazing games that are still worth playing today. Rather than comment on their downfall, I would like to show you some of their classics. They were most active while shareware games were a large market (think the Doom and Quake 1 era, and the time before then as well), so this will be a hands-on history lesson.

Most of you are going to need DOSBox, an emulator that runs the MS-DOS environment that many of these games required; they hail from the late 80s to mid 90s. Please download it, and a front-end to make it easier to use, from: http://www.dosbox.com/

You will need those handy to play most of the games discussed in this article. Note that while I do provide download links for the shareware episode of each game in this article, I cannot guarantee how long the links will remain active; they’re on 3D Realms’ server. If the downloads don’t work, you’ll have to find other links on your own.