Another example is Fallout’s original demo, which I inexplicably received in the mail when I was nine years old, in a huge silver envelope containing a cardboard foldout display case with a disc mounted inside. It remains the most beautiful presentation I’ve ever seen a game come with, and to this day I do not know why I received it.

I’ve never received anything else, and it has no return address or information on the sender.

I didn’t know what post-apocalypse was until this point. I didn’t have a PC for a year after receiving the demo. I fell madly in love with it when I finally entered the town of Scrapheap and stole a chaingun.

A year later, I had Fallout for christmas at far beyond the specified age rating.

To this day, it is my favourite game x.x <3

.. I did like Uplink though. It seemed entirely comprised of the 'good bits' of halflife – dark broken corridors lit by emergency lights, littered with dead scientists and with faint zombie-chitterings coming from around the corner.

Unfortunately, I can’t have been the only one interested in the damned thing. Getting the cover-disk issue back months later, I prised the jewel case off the front cover and found no CD inside! Bastards!

Of course, my P133 was probably not up to the task anyway, and I got to play it when I got the shiny new Pentium III with a bunch of such demos. The friendly AI sealed the deal for me: FPS games just hadn’t interested me until they started putting non-antagonists in. I must have replayed the bit where you round the shipping crates and find the HECU about to execute scientists innumerable times before I’d saved as many as possible. It didn’t matter that they had zero function in the world after that. Saving them was reward enough!

You could argue that The Path tried to do the same thing, but without the main hooks of the game itself.