My Quest to Find a Specific Demo Disc from 1997

27 years ago, I returned home to Australia after two long years living in the USA. I was twelve years old, and my family was re-establishing roots in our old home. One of the first things we did was buy a new computer, with the help of my cousin. My dad only needed something simple for work, but my cousin had priced up a rig with me in mind too. It was a Pentium II 233 MHz, with 128 MB of RAM, a huge 20 GB hard drive, S3 VGA card and a 3dfx Voodoo 3d accelerator.

This was the era of demo discs - gaming magazines almost always came with one taped to the front, packed with the latest demos of new and upcoming games. Many retailers, keen to capture a slice of the growing games market of the Dotcom Boom, also released their own software compilations, usually available at the cash register in store. One of the largest home and appliance retailers in Australia then (and still to this day) was Harvey Norman, and for a brief period in 1997, Harvey Norman stores carried "Harvey Norman: The CD-ROM".

I don't recall exactly how I came into possession of this CD - it's possible that it came with our new computer, or that my childhood friend down the road had brought it by. I recall that my cousin had installed Civilization II on the computer, but other than that, my only access to games, for a while, was the demos on this disc - and what a selection of demos it was.

The thing about demo discs that often gets forgotten is how brilliant they were at exposing gamers to a broad variety of games. In the days before digital distribution, social media, YouTube and Twitch, exposure to games and gaming news was mostly limited to a handful of early gaming websites and monthly gaming magazines. There were no Let's Play videos to watch - the only way you knew if you were going to like a game was if you had read a review, played it on a friend's computer, or tried the demo.

The Harvey Norman CD-ROM was a crash course in gaming tastes. Raptor, Death Rally, Need for Speed II, Wipeout 2097, Quake, Blood, MDK, KKND, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, Diablo, Fallout - this demo disc perfectly captured the zeitgeist of late 90s PC gaming, and was foundational in broadening my gaming palette and exposing me to genres and games that I would not have otherwise played.

Like many others, I voraciously consumed demo discs like this every month, trying out every game I could to see which ones I could ask for at Christmas or my birthday. Shortly after settling back into our old home, I was buying monthly issues of PC PowerPlay magazine and methodically working my way through their demos every month.

While those PC PowerPlay demo discs provided many fond memories and exposed me to a vast cross-section of late 90s and early 2000s gaming, I had always placed the Harvey Norman CD-ROM on a pedestal in my memories. This was my first exposure to Fallout, and my first real foray into RPGs outside of Ultima. This was my first experience of Need for Speed, Quake, Diablo and Blood. Hornet 3.0 and F-22 Lightning II were my first combat flight simulators. Two of my favourite games in my youth had been LucasArts' X-Wing and the incredible sequel, TIE Fighter, and X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter was a big leap forward in fidelity and into the world of multiplayer.

So cherished were my memories of this CD, that I had even falsely attributed it as the source of other beloved demos ("Remembering Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II" and "Remembering Rocket Jockey") - where I found those demos, I'm not sure, but my hazy memories of the era told me that of course it was this Harvey Norman CD.

The CD was more than just memories of demos, however. As I have discussed previously, my father was not computer literate, and he didn't really "get" games. But I never stopped trying to share my beloved hobby with him. My dad was an avid golfer, and it was an activity I often joined him on. So, when I saw the demo for Jack Nicklaus 4 on the demo disc, I of course introduced him to the game. Dad had this demo installed on his computer for many years, and he probably played the three-hole demo hundreds of times. Years later, he was still playing it, and the image of him sitting at the computer playing the Jack Nicklaus 4 demo is burned into my brain.

At some point in the early 2000s, the Harvey Norman CD-ROM ended up in a box somewhere, or perhaps went in the bin. I'd long since upgraded my computer and moved on to more modern games. The rise of digital distribution via Steam and rapid growth of the Internet had begun to chip away at the dominance of print media like gaming magazines. I was growing up. I had stopped spending my money on games magazines and started spending it on beer, rent and petrol. I could rely on YouTube to gauge whether I wanted to purchase a game. Before long, the era of demo discs was a distant but cherished memory.

It was about ten years ago, during the rise of indie games and the nostalgia boom of remasters, that I started to pay more heed to these memories. I wanted to find those old demo discs, load them up and relive happy, carefree days. But the Harvey Norman CD-ROM was long gone. In 2013, I got in touch with Harvey Norman customer service to ask whether they had an archive of demo CDs, but to no avail. They had thought I was searching for the actual games themselves, but after clarifying that I was looking for the demo disc, they told me they had no archived copies.

I tried again a few years later, this time through various Facebook groups, with no success. Then, again, I tried, about five years ago on the r/Australia subreddit, and two years ago in the r/Melbourne subreddit (Melbourne being my home town). That was the closest I came - one of the responses to my post on the r/Melbourne subreddit directed me to a 1995 Harvey Norman demo CD on the Internet Archive, but this was unfortunately the wrong one. I had all but given up hope. Unless the disc showed up in an old storage container somewhere, I simply had to accept the fact that this would remain nothing more than a memory.

A few weeks ago, I was tinkering with 86box, emulating a Windows 98 PC in order to get some old software running for a SUPERJUMP story. As I tend to do when tinkering with old software and hardware, I soon found myself distracted by nostalgic segues, such as installing After Dark screensavers or playing old games like Hover!. In this nostalgic mindset, I thought once again of the Harvey Norman CD-ROM, and decided to have another try at tracking it down. This time, I'd post on the Whirlpool Forums, a well-known Australian computing forum. If I was going to get my answer anywhere, it would be there.

I began writing my post, explaining what I could remember of the demo disc, when and where I had obtained it. I linked a video of the Harvey Norman jingle that would play in the intro video. For clarity, I wanted to provide a link to that other 1995 Harvey Norman demo CD that the r/Melbourne subreddit had sent me to, and specify that this was not the CD I was looking for. So, to find the link, I went to the Internet Archive and searched "Harvey Norman".

But wait. My search had yielded two results.

Staring back at me from the Internet Archive search results was that familiar rose-gold disc - Harvey Norman: The CD-ROM. Surely this couldn't be real? Is this the right disc? Where did it come from? When was it uploaded?

Hands shaking, I clicked the link, and saw that the disc image had been uploaded on 25 July 2023. I immediately downloaded the file and fired up my 86box Windows 98 virtual machine. I loaded the disc image. I waited. And then it began. That horrendous Harvey Norman jingle imprinted in my mind. The spinning image of the demo disc. The splash screen with the Fallout power armour and the F/A-18 Hornet firing a missile. I smiled in astonishment at the screen, overcome with joy. Tears welled up in my eyes, and the memories came flooding back. Sitting with my best friend, racing around the Pacifica track in Need for Speed II. Laying sticks of dynamite around the town in Outlaws. Watching a gang member get torn to shreds by the minigun in Fallout. Playing Quake Episode 1 over and over again.

Nostalgia is a strange thing. In my mind, I had attributed so much importance to this simple little disc. Hours of my life had been dedicated to it, replaying each demo dozens of times. It had fostered my interest in more than a few game series. There was never any possibility that revisiting it in 2024 could live up to the memories I had attributed to it. But, for a brief few moments, 27 years later, I was 12 years old again....

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