At eight years old, I had a PlayStation with no memory card and a single game. It’s not a complaint - I was so thankful for it - but when friends showed me their nifty save files and small collections, I couldn’t help but feel a little jealous. My childhood was always a stroll through Blockbuster. It was a constant wandering over to neighbors’ houses to play games from bookshelf libraries packed with SNES cartridges and endless discs. Me and my lonesome little copy of Rugrats: Search for Reptar were it for a while, but then my mom ordered pizza one night, and my pepperoni came packaged with a little PS1 demo disc. That changed my world, because when it comes to my experience in games, there’s nothing I’m more thankful for than the demo disc.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Ape Escape, Final Fantasy 8, and Crash Team Racing - a library of games I couldn’t afford. I had access to short adventures through games I admired behind glass countertops at game stores, and I think I played that demo more than the full games I ultimately acquired later on. A demo disc looks a bit like junk mail, something you’d toss in a sea of ads and shady letters, but as a child from a paycheck-to-paycheck family, a demo disc was my treasure.
Through demos, like that little Pizza Hut collection, I learned I loved genres I’d never waste my precious rental allowance on. I tried racing games, tactical RPGs, adventure games - all of it. I turned 20-minute test levels into hours of fun, finding my own ways to beat games outside of what it dictated. I spent years hunting discs like it, pulling them out of magazines, and taking the samples I could find at game shops. Collecting incomplete, often drastically different versions of games I could never own became my favorite thing to do in the PS1 and PS2 era.
Demo discs felt like a bizarre part of life to leave in the past. There’s no need now, especially as we move away from the physical and make those experiences wildly available through the digital. But there’s a painful, nostalgic feeling there whenever I thumb through my old collections and see those old Underground discs from PlayStation, and there’s an urge there to try to recreate that feeling by endlessly scrolling through free options on virtual storefronts, but it’s not the same.
I look at those demos now and can’t help but think that little girl would be smitten with the accessibility. A once poor kid who couldn’t afford a memory card suddenly having access to hundreds of free gaming sessions - far more than those little discs offered - but I still can’t help but miss them. Regardless of where we’re at now, I still look for their place on countertops and displays, wishing I could pick up another series of bite-sized adventures I may never try again.