Oh how I miss the time when game demos were all the rage. When they were our one and only avenue into a new game, without massive marketing campaigns with tens of trailers or deep dives. These demos gave us a glimpse of a new game, and we played them a hundred times over, poring over every frame and pixel because that's all we got before a full game came out.

Some demos did such a good job of pulling us in that they simply refused to leave our minds, and even became 'watercooler talk' or food for discussion with friends over recesses or in the playground. Still, it was never easy to make a perfect demo, which had the unenviable task of balancing two integral aspects — teasing the game just enough by giving a large enough chunk to munch, and also not giving away too much or revealing too many things. On those fronts, these are the game demos that reigned supreme above the rest, and are still the stuff of legends today.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater — Pizza Hut PlayStation demo disc (1999)

One warehouse, two skateboards, and one Anthony Hawk

Who knew a freebie from Pizza Hut would come to define an entire generation for gamers? Back in '99, Pizza Hut gave out a demo disc for some of the biggest games of the time, including Final Fantasy VII, Crash Team Racing, and, of course, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. The disc could also have been your chance to win a huge $500,000 prize, but even if you weren't the lucky chosen one, you still got some pretty cool games out of the disc.

On the THPS demo, all you got was 2 minutes in the warehouse with Tony Hawk and one out of two skateboards, and that was it. And yet, somehow, those two minutes changed everything. The flow, the soundtrack, the smooth-flowing animation — all of it worked brilliantly, and every kid kept resetting the 2-minute clock, going back in to try new kickflips and ollies to their heart's content. This was the demo that made Tony Hawk's Pro Skater a household name for gamers across the country, and eventually resulted in THPS becoming the generation-defining cultural phenomenon that it did.

The demo for the fantastic 1 + 2 remake was pretty darn solid, too, but there's just something extremely special about the nostalgia-soaked memories of the original demo for the first game.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

How many Zone of the Enders sales were for his demo?

Look, no offense to Zone of the Enders, but everyone who bought a disc for that game back in 2001 knew what they were really buying it for, and that was nothing but the Sons of Liberty demo. Dropped as a little taste of what Hideo Kojima was cooking at the time, this PS2 demo was an absolute masterclass in 'showing just enough'.

Players got to explore the tanker mission, marvel with open jaws at the graphics which were legendary for the time, and feel the fluid stealth mechanics and animations as you popped in and out of cover. Was this demo short? Yes, but only because you couldn't help but want more of it. This demo, like the rest of Sons of Liberty, was cinematic, immersive, and sparked endless conversations about where this fantastic franchise would go next. With this demo, Kojima-san released a cultural event, all packed into a 20-minute demo.

Doom 1993 (Shareware)

The stuff of floppy disc legends

This demo was a revolution, through and through. DOOM's shareware model let anyone with a PC experience an entire third of the game, all for free. The entirety of the 1993 game's first act was available to play in the demo, and boy did it spread like wildfire on floppy discs across schools, offices, and, of course, LAN parties.

That single act was enough to hook millions on to the game, proving just how immensely powerful a demo could be when the devs made sure that it felt like a complete experience. For many, the shareware was DOOM, and there was no shortage of people who played the demo endlessly without ever buying the whole game, simply because they didn't feel the need to. This was marketing and piracy rolled into one, and it changed gaming forever by rewriting the rules of game distribution for good.

Resident Evil 7 Teaser: Beginning Hour

The perfect announcement for a strong return to roots

When it was time for the Resident Evil franchise to turn a new leaf and go back to its pure survival-horror roots, Capcom took some very interesting turns. The first was to go completely first-person, and the second was to release one of the most fantastic demos of all time — Beginning Hour. A playable tape recording where you see the incidents of a "ghost-hunting trip gone wrong", this demo was never a part of the final game, but it perfectly set the tone for the rest of the game, and what new direction this fabled franchise was going to take.

The cryptic Baker house was oddly reminiscent of the Spencer mansion, especially in the way it was riddled with puzzles to solve and secrets to discover, thus becoming a fantastic thrill ride that is a joy to experience even today, eight years on.

The Stanley Parable Demonstration

A brilliant slice of well-written humor

While most demos try to sell you on the final product, The Stanley Parable's demo, in fact, did the exact opposite. This was built as a completely unique experience that was neer a part of the final experience. Instead, it was just a standalone slice of absurdist humor and narrative trickery.

The demo made fun at the expense of the very ideas of game demos, while still delivering the same tongue-in-cheek wit and humor that the game is known for today. It tried to condition you to expect nothing and everything, all at once. Very few demos have been this daring, and it's genuinely a piece of art on its own.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes

This one did indeed keep us waiting

Now, technically, Ground Zeroes wasn't a 'demo', but we all know that it was. Released in 2014 as a standalone prologue to The Phantom Pain, it offered players an open-ended sandbox mission that could be finished in under two hours. Critics may have argued about whether it was worth its $30 price tag (which later came down to $20), but we just couldn't stop experimenting with that sandbox mission.

This was a taste of what The Phantom Pain was going to look like — endless possibilities, endless ways to approach a mission, and brilliant, flawless technical achievements all around. Ground Zeroes was the precursor to one of the greatest open-world stealth games ever made, and now, ten years later, not only is MGSV one of the greatest games ever made, but Ground Zeroes is also in the hall of fame of all-time demos.

Silent Hills Playable Teaser (P.T.)

The one that got away...

P.T., or "Playable Teaser", is inarguably the most infamous game demo of all time. This was when Konami handed Kojima the reins to make the next Silent Hill game, which would've been called Silent Hills. To build the hype, Konami stealthily dropped this playable teaser on the PlayStation 4, which introduced us to an endlessly looping apartment hallway filled with dread, atmosphere, and a terrifying, lumbering ghost called Lisa.

The internet collectively lost its mind at P.T., thanks to its cryptic imagery, incredibly tense atmosphere, and every layer of the demo filled with trauma and immersion. The cherry on the cake? It revealed that Norman Reedus would be the protagonist of the game, and Guillermo del Toro was heavily involved. Sadly, Konami killed the game and de-listed the demo, and what followed was a terrible break-up between Kojima and Konami, but P.T. remains a legend preserved in everyone's memory, and the PlayStation hard drives of a select few.

Word to the wise, though — P.T. is fully playable on PC today with ShadPS4, showing just how far PS4 emulation has come today.

Demos were our gateways into incredible experiences

The greatest game demos were never just glorified advertisements. Instead, they were experiences in and of themselves worth remembering. Some may have given us bite-sized slices of the masterpieces that were to follow, while some verily redefined what a demo could be.

Today, demos have been largely replaced by early access and beta weekends, but in the hearts and memories of a lot of gamers, especially those who grew up in the '90s and early 2000s, these demos through free discs were our gateways into incredible experiences we would never have discovered otherwise.