Fabien Sanglard revisits how id Software’s Quake shareware CD packed encrypted full games onto oversized 1990s media

The article looks back at id Software’s 1996 Quake shareware CD, which used only a small fraction of CD-ROM capacity for the demo and filled the rest with encrypted full versions of id’s game catalog. Sanglard explains how the unlockable catalog seemed clever for distribution but created practical and security problems once the disc was in users’ hands.

The story highlights an early version of today’s digital entitlement model: ship the bits first, then sell access later. It also shows why client-side protection is fragile, especially when cheap storage makes it tempting to distribute valuable locked content broadly.