The Wild History Of Demo Discs, Shareware And Covertapes Share Image: Kotaku Back before YouTube and Twitch and always online DRM, developers needed more effective ways of marketing than just relying on word of mouth. This resulted in shareware, demos and demo discs, free slices of playable content that spawned one of the most interesting phases in the gaming. The earliest roots of the demo as we know it can be traced right back to the computers of the ’80s and ’90s. An entire industry built itself around the idea of giving people freely distributed packages, to convince users to buy the full product.