MrFlibble wrote:486 player wrote:Accordin' to Old School DOS, Alien Cabal's freeware.
I haven't been able to find any proof of that other than that site admin's claim.
Recently I found an archived copy of the game's original
official website, preserved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. And it turns out that starting somewhere in late July 2000, the main page had a link to the full version of the game, available at no charge:
The file itself was not properly preserved (only the first megabyte or so was stored), but the file name and size is the same as of the download offered by
Old School DOS Games.
The full version package is updated to the latest version (v1.2) and includes both the DOS and the Windows versions. Also it contains the latest version of the game editor.
The problem is that the site does not have any kind of freeware release announcement. An indirect clue may be found in the form of a message (archived by Google Groups) where Greg Taylor (one of the developers) offers another user to send a free copy of the game:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.gam ... mSPNvpFvYJ
The message is dated May 28, 1998. It can be assumed that the game did not have much popularity, and at some point the developers decided to release it as completely free.