I’ve been pandering to my gaming nostalgia of late, replaying childhood favorites like Sly Cooper, playing new games that adhere to retro aesthetics like Celeste, playing basically anything by Nintendo (who seem to be masters of evoking a nostalgic vibe in all their games). During my latest phase of nostalgia, a fleeting memory resurfaced, that memory being of game demos.
Back in the “golden age” of gaming, demos were a way to get actual hands on playtime for free, rather than relying on reviews from critics that may have different gaming tastes than yours, or simply going out and buying a game blind with the hopes that it wouldn’t be complete garbage when you get home. Demos have been around since the early 90’s, oftentimes being packaged inside another, more well-known game as a marketing strategy for smaller companies to get their name out to the gaming population in the most efficient way possible. Occasionally certain companies would also place demos of their own games inside released titles, either ones that were successfully sold already or one that is soon to be shipped. My first memory of game demos spawned from these circumstances, in the original Animal Crossing on the Nintendo GameCube.
In Animal Crossing, you could obtain NES furniture pieces that could be placed in your house. They were difficult to obtain, most of them randomly showing up in Crazy Redd’s store, on the island (which required an original Gameboy to be hardwired into your GameCube to visit), or winning Tom Nook’s monthly lottery. Each one consisted of a fully playable NES classic; there were 20 in total, including Balloon Fight, Donkey Kong, and Tennis (those were the three I remember playing the most as a young eight-year-old). A few of the NES items were never fully implemented in the game and could only be unlocked through digging into the code, unfortunately, so most players didn’t get to play the original Legend of Zelda in their Animal Crossing game.
The Legend of Zelda demo did resurface, however, in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, alongside 11 other Nintendo classics as a timed playthrough of the game. Seven titles were available from the moment you boot up SSBB, while five are unlocked through completing various challenges. These demos functioned differently from the ones in Animal Crossing in one specific aspect, and that was the time restriction. While some of the old NES games like Donkey Kong were still available to play, a few games from future console generations were available as well, including Star Fox 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Because these games were both newer and a lot larger in scope, players would spawn at a specific point in the narrative and a timer was placed in the demo, which would automatically end the game once it hit 0.
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lash forward a few years and I was gifted a ps3 for Christmas. It was my first console with full online functionality, and with that came external demos that could be downloaded directly from the Playstation Store. I still vividly remember downloading my first ps3 demo for Infamous, Sucker Punch’s first game for the next generation and the first game with their new IP after Sly Cooper. I was so excited for the full game I replayed the three levels in the demo over half a dozen times before the game was released, and a few years later I did the same thing with the demo for Infamous 2. As time passed I tried out several other game demos on the ps3, some timed, some isolating specific quests or events, all of them giving me a pretty good indication of whether I would be willing to pay money for the full game upon release.
But then something unfortunate happened: Sucker Punch never released a demo for Infamous: Second Son. This revelation never came to me until I began thinking back on game demos recently, as it was their first title for the next console generation and I didn’t have a ps4 at the time of the game’s launch, so I simply bought the game once I had the proper console. After realizing I skipped the third Infamous demo, I also realized that I haven’t played ANY demos on my ps4. Looking deeper into both AAA titles and indie games, it seems that many companies don’t release demos of their games anymore before launch, and it also appears that this trend spiked with the latest Xbox and Playstation generation.
That being said, it is interesting to note a lot of these same companies will create some sort of demo to show to the masses at conventions like E3, but more often than not those demos will never see a release to the general public. A lot of executives in the industry will claim that taking the time to isolate specific sections of a game to create a free, smaller product for consumers costs too much money nowadays and pulls potential resources from the finished title, but if they are still creating gameplay videos to show at conferences, why can they not repurpose that work and release it to everybody?
Gone are the days of demos playable inside other games it seems, and external demos are dying out as well. There are still some companies that are attempting to give expected players some sort of hands on playtime, they just seem to be growing fewer and farther in between; Forza 7 and FIFA 18 both have demos on the Xbox One available late last year. Nintendo specifically is still going strong, offering some sort of demo or gameplay session for nearly every title they release, though many of these are honestly rather pathetic attempts at showcasing their game (Yo-kai Watch had a demo that was 10 minutes long. Seven minutes was dialogue and the other three was a dialogue heavy battle tutorial.). It seems that many companies are ditching the demo model in favor of either episodic releases, where the first episode is sometimes free to play while the rest require purchase, or alpha/beta testing and early access releases that [blatantly] employ free QA labor while “showcasing” their game in a rough state. Not only that, but with the rise in Let’s Plays and Twitch Streams that will oftentimes receive an early key to play games before they are officially launched, it seems like companies believe players don’t have to actually experience their new titles for themselves as long as enough gameplay footage is available to view.
Personally, I kind of miss the demo days. There is something of a distilled experience that comes from watching someone else play a game that you would rather try out for yourself, and I’m not one to constantly pay full price for a game only to return it for a less-than-full-price refund if I didn’t enjoy it. That being said, I could just be pandering to my nostalgia when I say I long for the days of game demos once more. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
