Forgotten Shareware: FSGames' Gladiator

Remember when shareware games used to be a thing? You’d typically exit them and encounter screens that asked for some cash in return of the awesome features of a full game? There was actually one I really enjoyed and ended up purchasing – I literally mailed some cash in an envelope to a certain developer named Tom Ricket and he emailed me with the files for the full version of a shareware I sought and ended up enjoyed immensely, Gladiator.

I’m talking about that really obscure dungeon crawler some may find akin to Gauntlet. Forgotten Sages’ Gladiator, dated from 1995. I played a bunch of it as a kid, and out of curiosity I decided to look it up. It's open source now, and with my newfound knowledge of C I hope to mess around with it a bunch. Before that, however, I decided to play it through once more, just to be reminded how much fun I had playing it.

Like Gauntlet, it is a hack-and-slash but with a twist of RPG and strategy in terms of building and managing a team of mercenaries to fight your way through "scenarios," instanced dungeons that are loosely connected in a narrative of survival.

You can roll deep with a team of soldiers, archers, druids, fairies, elves, barbarians, orcs, slime, undead skeletons, thieves, healing clerics, and ghosts. An all-star cast of fantasy characters (not that deep, though, since there is apparently a team limit of about 25), each class of character mentioned above have their own characteristics. Fairies, for example, can naturally fly above forests of trees that would obstruct most other characters. They're incredibly weak, though, so you don't want them to engage in combat alone. Ghosts can fly through all obstacles, clerics can heal and druids can create obstacles to slow the advance of your enemies. There is a lot of depth to the classes and types of attacks and abilities they can employ in the field, and they can unlock more abilities by leveling.

As seen above, there are archers! I felt compelled to name this one "BIg Bo."

Managing your mercs can get pretty involved considering you have cash that you can allot to leveling up your characters. You can find cash lying around in dungeons and you also get cash for simply completing scenarios with a bonus for completing them quickly. With that cash, you can increase characters' skills or level them up, although they also level up naturally with the experience they get from slaying foes and completing scenarios. If your smart about the skills you boost and who you commit to leveling up, however, you'll get a leg up over your opponents.

If you level your archers enough, for example, they unlock the special ability "Exploding Bolts." While their normal attack is shooting arrows, this special fires arrows that explode on impact with devastating splash damage that will hurt enemies and even yourself if you're not careful!

With a team of properly trained mercenaries, there are no unbeatable scenarios in this game!

If you really wanted to mix it up, however, there's even split-screen multiplayer! Yes, split-screen multiplayer on PC. As such, the control scheme on keyboards are really weird, but you do have the option to change them! Nevertheless, I never actually tried playing this split-screen multiplayer with anyone, but I remember being amazed at this idea, since I played this as a kid who had no idea how these things could work on PC. The main menu even lets you configure it to either cooperative or PVP if you wanted to go at it with your friends, after you got past the awkward split keyboard controls.

Another interesting aspect is that the narrative of scenarios can actually branch at some point. In one scenario, you end with having the option of taking one of two exits -- one that will bring you directly through a harder scneario and one that eases you into the game with scenarios that aren't as immediately intense with the numbers and variety of enemies. Considering most of the games I played back then were extremely linear, this was also kind of mindblowing for me.

The full game even came with a scenario game I messed around with a lot. In fact, the scenario editor kind of got me interested in how games were developed, and so here I am! Now I'll get to mess around with this game in C; maybe I'll port it to my phone...

Gladiator is a really old school game (I mean I first encountered it as a shareware), but I feel like it ages well. I can still definitely sink some time going through its scenarios, leading mercenaries to victory through the game's instanced dungeons.

EDIT: This game is now available for free, open source and ready-to-play on Windows and Linux as OpenGlad(offsite link), bring your nostalgia goggles!

Anyone else have shareware games they can look back at fondly?