The Internet Archive makes 758 classic PC Gamer demo discs available to the public

The good ole days: Gaming magazines were a staple of my childhood. In the 90s, before the Internet really took off, print publications like GamePro, Nintendo Power, and PC Gamer were the primary way to stay up to date with the gaming industry. Hardcore gamers like myself subscribed to all the major magazines, and there was no better feeling than when an issue arrived in the mail with a free demo.

Getting to try snippets of new games without having to spend extra money at your local rental store was awesome, and it was doubly cool for PC games, since rental outlets for such titles weren’t a thing. Some of my earliest PC gaming memories involved demo discs, and now thanks to PC Gamer and The Internet Archive, you can revisit the demo era.

The PC Gamer collection currently consists of 758 entries including loads of demo discs from the 90s and 2000s. A quick skim revealed some of my personal favorites including Soldier of Fortune, Left 4 Dead, Need for Speed: High Stakes, Worms, Kingpin: Life of Crime, Resident Evil, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six; go back further and you’ll find even earlier titles on floppy disks like Theme Park and The Incredible Machine 2.

Several entries are simply labeled with the month they were released, and don’t explicitly state which demo files are on the disc. For these, I suppose you would have to do a bit of research to try and link them to that specific magazine issue or just download the ISO and see what you find.

Available demos span a variety of languages including English, Italian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Portuguese, and Spanish, among others. Given that much variety, surely you’ll be able to find something in your native language worth checking out.

Most of the discs appear to be around 650MB in size, which shouldn’t take too long to download over a decent connection. Floppies are only a few megabytes and can be had within seconds.