/vr/ - Retro Games

Maximum Doom is the name given to bonus content distributed with the Master Levels for Doom II in 1995. It consists of 1830 amateur PWAD files of varying quality downloaded from the Internet (191 for Doom, 1629 for Doom II and 10 for Heretic). Many of these files are still available, for example on the idgames archive. Some contain copyrighted material, such as sound files from television programmes such as Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Simpsons.

>>6211870
>(Doom being the ultimate example of this)
With Doom, that was part of the shareware market model, the first episode was free and you were encouraged to share it and just give it to as many people as you wanted, because it was free advertising on iD Software's part.
I imagine the majority of normies didn't ever buy the full version, but enough did that it still made iD stinking rich, to the point that piracy wasn't of much concern to them, or, not in the traditional way.

There were companies like Wizard Works (and a lot of small fly by night companies and what not) who would just scrape BBSs for .wads people made and then stick them on compilation disks to sell them, shovelware, which did piss off iD because a lot of this stuff was fucking low quality crap (and quite a lot of it contained copyrighted material) which Wizard Works happily slapped Doom branding onto.
iD would ironically do exactly this later with Maximum Doom, 1830 .wad files (for a total of 3201 levels) downloaded from the internet, most of fucking terrible quality, funnily also with some unauthorized copyrighted content, the notion was to somehow upstage these shovelware hawkers, by hawking their own awful shovelware. Yeah! Take that, Wizard Works!
Also, Maximum Doom contains a version of TNT Evilution's Map 17, before TNT Evilution was bought and then sold as a commercial product, which is a little funny to me.

Other points of piracy with Doom would be published retail games using plagiarizing content from Doom, like Operation Body Count, or the Chinese bootleg game Mars 3D, which used reverse engineered Doom code, with mix of Doom and Duke Nukem 3D assets, some transformed, some not.