I was going to bring up Carr Software's Capture the Flag as soon as I saw the headline, and was pleasantly surprised to see it made the cut for the article. A few years ago I finally got around to ordering the full version for my dad, and it was nice getting to tell Mr. Carr how much we had enjoyed his game over the years.
Carr also made Pirate Battles and Treasure Island, at least one of which I remembered from my childhood, whereas I've never played Capture the Flag.
The sprites used in the shareware game I played remained etched in my memory, along with the red and blue colors for the teams, the top-down view with vibrant colors, the Windows 95 GUI, and keywords like "trapper" and "scout" (the other game apparently had "digger") but I had forgotten the name over the years and took me a lot of searching to find it again.
There are some communities like Reddit's tipofmyjoystick that are geared towards locating games by description, and the process inspired me to contribute to curation/catalog sites for games.
Abandonware sites fulfill much of that latter niche now, but these are not abandonware!
After I found the game's name, I found that there were very few Google search results for "shareware pirate battles carrsoft" or "shareware treasure island carrsoft". There's room for more shareware catalogs and searchable, browseable thematic directories.
He still sells a bundle of his games at carrsoft.com and I bought them recently. Highly recommend!
