$10 Quake shareware CD locked copies of all id Software games behind a flawed encryption scheme — pay-over-the-phone system only held up for 39 days after 1996 release, leaving developer with 150,000 discs it couldn't sell

A person playing Quake III on a computer from 2001.

Back before fast broadband internet came to most homes, game developers released their latest titles through shareware CDs so gamers could try them out before buying. And that's what id Software did when it released Quake in 1996.

As recounted by Google software engineer Fabien Sanglard, the company put both a shareware version and the complete version of Quake on a CD for just $10. But because the shareware version and the complete game only took up 22MB of a 640MB CD, the remaining 618MB had practically no use. id Software came up with the idea of including full, encrypted versions of all its other titles of the time on the CD, too.