this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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I remember playing Jill of the Jungle in early 1997, it was on one of those "100 in 1" pirate CD that were common around the time the CD-ROM was introduced (became somewhat common in my region).
That same pirate compilation had Commander Keen, Dune 2 and many other games.
Shareware was big back then. Chances are good that your copy was actually legal.
I had a bunch of those myself back then, dozens of great shareware games on each disc. Sure beat trying to download something on slow slow dialup.
And those games usually got really really hard beyond the first episode, so we (at least me) wouldn't have gotten far in the full games anyways.
Dune 2 at least wasn't shareware.
Maybe had a demo though. There were a few discs that had shareware and playable demos.
Doesn't sound like what they had, though. Especially if it had episodes 2 and 3, etc.
Did you enjoy Jill back then?
I did. Only ever played the shareware episode, but it was one of my favourite platformers, alongside Duke Nukum and Cosmo.
It was all right. It was fun to try something new.
I was more into RPGs and strategy games even back then.
I love that all those games are now being ported to retro consoles. I have all the Commander Keen games in my pocket for when I feel like fighting aliens.
100 sounds low, they tended to be 300-600 per CD, and all shareware not pirated, so perfectly legal and encouraged. I had multiple such disks as a kid… the jank in how to get the games working (dos and win3.1, mostly) was what got me to learn to use computers back in the day.