Winners of the playable demo gambit

Back in the day, demo discs weren't just an opportunity to see if you liked a game or not. They were things you would play over and over, because new video games were such a rare luxury. Some games were daringly unconventional, and might have seemed daunting to prospective customers, but the fact that hundreds of thousands of kids had already played the first level fifty times really helped them find homes. Games that are often misdiagnosed as "dated" now, but in truth, they were never easy to get into. You just had to have played the demo a bunch of times.