WildSnake
What is it?
In 1996, Gamos remade their 1992 DOS game Zmeyelov for Windows 95; in 1998, Arsenal (a meanwhile obviously defunct company) translated this remake into English. Gameplay remained the same, only the graphics were new. And these graphics, so it seems, took up an enormous lot of space.
At least the demo for the game was a veritable monster, weighing no less than 10MB. To fully appreciate this, you must see it in the context of its time: comparable games, even with elaborate graphics like Velena or Greedy or Othello by Cylog usually fit on a floppy, in most cases they were well below 1MB. Downloading 10MB over the type of modem that was then the most common connection to the Internet might well take an hour or more.
Unlike the demo of the original game, this one did allow for
longer gameplay, interrupting it however avery minute with a
demo version
pop-up, sincerely diminishing the fun. All this
may have contributed to the game being not much of a success, and
the Zmeyelov concept remaining fairly unknown outside Russia.
The Thought Guild, one of the distributors of the English version, still has a page for it, but the demo download doesn't work any more, and I have no idea whether they still actually sell it. Apart from here, the only places where you still can download the demo are a few Chinese sites.
