Shareware Heroes
The Renegades Who Redefined Gaming at the Dawn of the Internet
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Narrated by:
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Richard Moss
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By:
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Richard Moss
About this listen
Shareware Heroes is a comprehensive, meticulously researched exploration of an important and too-long overlooked chapter in video game history
Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet takes listeners on a journey, from the beginnings of the shareware model in the early 1980s, the origins of the concept, even the name itself, and the rise of shareware's major players—the likes of id Software, Apogee, and Epic MegaGames—through to the significance of shareware for the "forgotten" systems—the Mac, Atari ST, Amiga—when commercial game publishers turned away from them.
This book also charts the emergence of commercial shareware distributors like Educorp and the BBS/newsgroup sharing culture. And it explores how shareware developers plugged gaps in the video gaming market by creating games in niche and neglected genres like vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-ups (e.g. Raptor and Tyrian), or racing games (e.g. Wacky Wheels and Skunny Kart), or RPGs (God of Thunder and Realmz), until finally, as the video game market again grew and shifted, and major publishers took control, how the shareware system faded into the background and fell from memory.
©2022 Richard Moss (P)2023 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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In this authoritative and fascinating new audiobook, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative: even when you're alone. Sawyer's audiobook is filled with compelling stories about the inventions that changed our world.
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Worth reading
- By Glenn on 12-29-10
By: Keith Sawyer
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Meatball Sundae
- By: Seth Godin
- Narrated by: Seth Godin
- Length: 4 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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New Marketing, whose tools include things like MySpace, You Tube, Web sites, permission marketing, cable TV, and viral techniques, is reshaping our world. But many companies try to use the tools without first getting their organization and products in sync with them. The result: what Seth Godin calls a "meatball sundae". A big, ineffective mess.
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Meatball Godin
- By Oliver Nielsen on 09-11-08
By: Seth Godin
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Ask Your Developer
- How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century
- By: Jeff Lawson
- Narrated by: Jeff Lawson
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Jeff Lawson, developer turned CEO of Twilio (one of Bloomberg Businessweek's Top 50 Companies to Watch in 2021), creates a new playbook for unleashing the full potential of software developers in any organization, showing how to help management utilize this coveted and valuable workforce to enable growth, solve a wide range of business problems, and drive digital transformation.
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Two and Half Stars
- By Anonymous User on 12-16-21
By: Jeff Lawson
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You Only Have to Be Right Once
- The Unprecedented Rise of the Instant Tech Billionaires
- By: Randall Lane
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Over the last three years, Forbes has published in depth profiles of this new batch of billionaires, including the founders of Spotify, Dropbox, Tumblr, and Twitter. Now, in a compilation introduced and updated by Forbes editor Randall Lane, fans and critics alike will get a comprehensive look at who these super-entrepreneurs are and what they say about their own success and their plans for the future.
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Awesome book!
- By Jamal Love on 06-17-15
By: Randall Lane
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Play Bigger
- How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets
- By: Play Bigger LLC, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and others
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Winning today isn't about beating the competition at the old game. It's about inventing a whole new game - defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time. You can't build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you're going to lose. In this farsighted, pioneering guide, the founders of Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger rely on data analysis and interviews to understand the inner workings of "category kings".
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The most impactful new thinking of the year
- By Chris Guest on 12-21-16
By: Play Bigger LLC, and others
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What Would Google Do?
- By: Jeff Jarvis
- Narrated by: Jeff Jarvis
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In a book that's one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google, the fastest-growing company in history, to discover 40 clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by.
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Shallow and one-sided
- By JimmiJ on 02-04-09
By: Jeff Jarvis
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Little Rice
- Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream
- By: Clay Shirky
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 3 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the 1990s China has been climbing up the ladder of quality, from doing knockoffs to designing its own high-end goods. Xiaomi - its name literally means "little rice" - is landing squarely in this shift in China's economy. But the remarkable rise of Xiaomi from startup to colossus is more than a business story because mobile phones are special. The common desiderata of the global population, mobile phones offer the kind of freedom and connectedness that autocratic countries are terrified of.
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Informative and up to date.
- By Kevin on 01-10-16
By: Clay Shirky
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The Art of Business Wars
- Battle-Tested Lessons for Leaders and Entrepreneurs from History's Greatest Rivalries
- By: David Brown
- Narrated by: David Brown
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on the chart-topping Business Wars podcast, stories, and lessons from history’s greatest business rivalries, interspersed with audio clips from the podcast. Using Chinese military genius Sun Tzu’s strategies as a guide, Brown examines why some companies triumph while others crumble....
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Just a repeat of the pod cast…..
- By Vm2008 on 02-01-22
By: David Brown
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Appetite for Self-Destruction
- The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age
- By: Steve Knopper
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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For the first time, Appetite for Self-Destruction recounts the story of the precipitous rise and fall of the recording industry over the past three decades, when the incredible success of the CD turned the music business into one of the most glamorous, high-profile industries in the world - and the advent of file sharing brought it to its knees.
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Awesome Book
- By Todd on 08-15-09
By: Steve Knopper
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Program or Be Programmed
- Ten Commands for a Digital Age
- By: Douglas Rushkoff
- Narrated by: Douglas Rushkoff
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In 10 chapters, composed of 10 "commands", Rushkoff provides cyber enthusiasts and technophobes alike with the guidelines to navigate the digital new universe. In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping listeners to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age - and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries.
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Good book, but with some crazy ranting
- By Bjarne on 02-05-15
By: Douglas Rushkoff
What listeners say about Shareware Heroes
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jonathan C. Weeks
- 11-28-23
Hire Voice Actor
This is just a customer reminder that if you are doing audio book narration and you have little to no experience with speaking or performance, just hire a voice actor. Every time I hear that the book is narrated by the author, I say "oh no" - it's so rare for that to turn out well.
And in this situation I feel like the narration did the contents a great disservice. The voice is dulcet and gentle, so you want to like them, but then you have trouble understanding, get stuck on weird voice quirks, and worse, sometimes you hear a different take of the same line right after one another. Sometimes the voice sounds confused, like it's asking you if the information is correct.
The content is well done, if organized a little odd. It lacks narrative flow, but you can treat it more as an encyclopedia than a story. But because of the narration, I found my mind wandering or distracted by the voice itself.
I only recommend the written version, and would recommend checking this out if a voice actor ever steps up the plate.
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- Will
- 05-04-23
Narration is hard to stomach
I hard a very difficult time understanding the narrator. "Beta" was pronounced "beet-uh" for instance. I had to really concentrate to understand the narration, which just isn't going to work for an audiobook. Maybe the Kindle version is better.
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1 person found this helpful