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That has been like that since there have been publishers in the games industry.

Back then, the indies stuff was only if you happened to live nearby someone you knew doing bedroom coding, distributing tapes on school, or they got lucky land their game on one of those shareware tapes collection.

Trying to actually get a publisher deal was really painful, and if you did, they really wanted their money back in sales.



Shareware tapes collection? Was there really such a thing? If so I would imagine it would be one or two demos per tape?


Yes there was such a thing, for those of us that leaved throught the 1980's.

There are tons of games that you can fit into 60m, 90m, or 180m tapes, when 48 KB/128 KB is all you got.

More like 20 or something.

Magazines like Your Sinclair and Crash would have such cassete tapes,

https://archive.org/details/YourSinclair37Jan89/YourSinclair...

https://www.crashonline.org.uk/

They would be glued into the magazine with adhesive tape, and later on to avoid them being stolen, the whole magazine plus tape would be in a plastic.




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