I'm not sure what it was like in other countries, but over here from the late 90s to something like 2010, when there was still a lot of gaming press, pretty much all of it came with CDs and later DVDs, first mostly filled with demo versions, later with full games. Sometiems shovelwere, sometimes great older titles, sometimes even pretty good recent releases. Eventually many of those magaiznes shut down, killed by the Internet, and anyway games on the disks would more and more often require Steam... the last magazine to include them is still around, still named after the CDs it came with in the 90s, but they gave up on disks a few years back. But there was a lot of good stuff there, among all the rubbish. That's how I got my copy of Star Trek Armada, Beyond Divinity, Icewind Dale 2, and even "recently" (a decade ago) the first Trine.

Anyway, I had tons and tons of this stuff. Sadly a lot of the shovelwere got either lost or thrown away (I do regret not keeping the 90s demo-filled CDs around), but I still have quite a few of those disks. In fact, there are still a few games there I keep promising myself I will eventually give a try, and never do because other, "shinier" titles keep getting in the way. A sort of phantom backlog, hidden away in drawers. Port Royale 2, Velvet Assassin, Spells of Gold (two copies of that actually :D), Secret Files: Tunguska, Stubbs the Zombie, Ankh...

Anyone else with a similar "accidental" backlog out there? Some cool games you picked up that way over the years? Was that even a thing in western countries?

I have only vague memories of it but the latest that i remember was up to 2005 because then i stopped paying attention to it because drm so yes we had them in scandinavia and they came with demos and even full versions indeed but i only truly remember the demos since i bought a lot of physical games at retailers at that point but they where useful back then for checking out games and the demos was not as deceptive as they would be today if it was more of them or in better words, the wrong corporations hands.

I must say, i suddenly feel a bit of nostalgia !

Funny you say that now. Barely month or so ago I excavated from closet magazine release of Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, which I always wanted to try but back then had to gave up because didn't work good on my pc. Recently I somehow reminded about it and since game is not available in digital anymore this DVD appeared very handy. This was probably first game I installed from optical disc in like 10 years.

Some other notable titles I got from magazines include Arx Fatalis, Fable: Lost Chapters, Stunt GP and Duke Nukem Manhattan Project.

I still remember magazines giving free games every month. Mostly spanish and french magazines. Then the portuguese videogame magazines started carrying free games as well. This was also around the second half of the 90s.
First they started giving low-budget games (some of which I can't even remember the name). Stuff like Hellboy, Devil Inside and games from Russia/Eastern Europe. Once in a while they'd even distribute classics like Marathon 2 or Septerra Core.

In the early 2000s a magazine called "BGamer" finally started giving games from the "big ones" (EA, Ubi, Activision, etc). Most of them are on GOG now.
Then, after 2005 they began carrying almost only games with steam attached. And somewhere after 2009 every bonus game had steamworks. But since I was mostly interested in the magazine I bought it anyways. Meaning that I soon grew a backlog of AAA games which I would never play.

All the portuguese gaming magazines are dead now. But I still have some cool stuff from those times.
All the DRM-free games which came with the magazines (and that I later bought on GOG) I have since offered to the local public libraries (it's possible for libraries to loan CD games, DVDs and music, as well as books here). The steam-only stuff I've offered to folks who own steam accounts.

Definitely was like that in Germany in the late 1990s/early 2000s. I don't know exactly when it ended, kind of lost track of gaming and gaming magazines around 2002/03.
Demos were pretty fun, I remember the ones for Comamndos and Mysteries of the Sith pretty well. Those just included levels which were in the game, but other demos had special content created for them, e.g. Starcraft's demo featured a mini-campaign iirc.
One thing I vaguely remember is some gaming magazine (which was closed down not long after; PC Action iirc) adopting a kind of "Sex sells" attitude and featuring scantily clad models and juvenile jokes. Struck me as rather silly and pathetic. But also shows how different the times were, would be immediately shot down today for sexism (maybe not entirely without reason).

Anyway, I threw away all my old gaming magazines many years ago. I'm not entirely sure if I still have cds with demos from them, but even if, I'm probably never going to play them again.

I only still have the disk with Gothic 3 from Level, since I haven't touched it. There were a few issues I purchased, just for the games they came with, King's Bounty: The Legend, Drakensang and Two Worlds 2, and a few more I won several years before on a site, how I discovered Gothic, that also being the only one I played, I recall another was Bloodrayne 2, and another Red Faction, but I didn't care for those.
When they went under I tried, along with another guy, to put together the list on MobyGames, but it was left incomplete, was hard to dig up issues past a certain point, site broken, then gone and archive links not enough. Towards the end they had Steam keys though, so no longer cared anyway. Now it should probably be easier, kept trying to check again but never got around to it.

The staff had a brief attempt to come back in print as Nivelul 2 (Level 2), but that had Steam keys too, and only a few issues were released.

Yes, here in Brazil we had many PC magazines with demos and full games, it was the easier way to find old games. Like the U.S., during the 90s and early 00s we had big boxes for full price games, re-release thin boxes with discounted prices, and then we had the mags for games with very affordable prices. I played Prince of Persia 1&2, Settlers II, Knights & Merchants, Die Hard Trilogy and many others thanks to these magazines.

Going by a few quick searches over on archive.org (which, iirc, also has quite the repository of Demo-CDROM images available for download) pretty much every (European) country seems to have undergone this era. Had scans of what looked like Italian, Finnish, French, Romanian, even Turkish magazines popping up.

As already mentioned, in Germany it was no different at that time. In fact, there were so many different magazines focusing on the PC platform alone, the monthly issues would fill several rows on the racks.
Used to collect PC Games with the occasional issue of PC Action (if it covered/featured something of interest that PC Games did not) thrown in.
The vast majority of the magazines themselves have long gone the way of the Dodo but quite a few of the accompanying CDROMs I still have stowed away (and, one of these days, maybe should check if they actually still work). Demos I vividly remember playing the shit out of back then would include Ecstatica, Destruction Derby, Gothic, Silent Hunter, Diablo 2, among others.
In regards to chucked-in full versions of games I honestly can't think of anything noteworthy that I wouldn't have had gotten through illicit means, then regularly purchased or been gifted as a christmas or birthday present anyway. Apart from Planescape: Torment maybe, which I bought a totally overpriced second-hand boxed version of only much later.

Oh, I thought this was gong to be about type in programs or cover disk games.


Yeah, there were a lot of demos of games I had; not accounting for compliations of shareware like Game Empire or Galaxy of Games (Romtech, not eGames.)

Oh yes definitely, I have pretty much all of my discs still, as well as most of the magazines. I bought several games off of the demos included on those discs: Anno 1602, Rainbow 6, Commandos, Age of Wonders. I do plan at some point to go through them again, and see how many of the demos still work.

A particular highlight for me were the game trailers, especially around E3. Before I had a proper internet connection, those discs were the only place I could find eye watering videos showcasing upcoming games.

Those magazines were something special in the pre-everyone-has-internet-days, and in a way I pity today's young gamers who are growing up without them. It was a kind of golden age where things were more innocent: the big gaming companies could still be looked up to, and all the political nonsense was still years away (for the most part at least).

I got a few of those over the years.
Including some PS1 demo disks, if I recall correctly.

One PC CD I actually saved, just because of how many full games it included. It's still holds up as a pretty epic collection for a magazine CD, in my opinion.

For me it started with shareware disks followed by cds on various magazines. Editing autoexec.bat & config.sys was sometimes more exciting than the program (s) itself. :-)

The demos impressed me most were "duke nukem 3d & "descent" which (iirc, but i can be mistaken) i got from cd's of the "PC Player" magazine.

CDs I still have, are games from the Lucas Arts series from a magazine called "Bestseller Games". Back then i was pretty nocturnal and i always bought the magazines at an nightly opened gas station.

In addition to the full versions, "Bestseller Games" had a complete solution and a few extras like maps or cheats.
The games could be run directly from the cd.

To my surprise, I found the entire magazines loooong time after on https://www.kultboy.com/ (digitized, without the games).
Since my magazines were "attacked" by the ravages of time (cause of moving etc.)...this source was more than welcome. :-)

Same goes for "PC Player" - i had them all (!), but unfortunately i had to temporarily store the magazines in a damp cellar - throwing the moldy magazines in the garbage was really very sad.

Luckily (for me) you can read all PC Player" mags at http://www.pcplayer.de/ - what I actually do now and then before I start an older game - that is a ritual to get me "in the mood". ;-)

I remember PC Gamer here used to include CDs that would have mods on them which they would basically bill as free games. I know they did this with Half-Life a lot.

Funny thing about PC Gamer is they stopped including discs but kept the magazine price higher than normal anyway.

If you're talking about the former LEVEL computer game magazines, man, I had like an entire collection of those back in the day. I bought almost everything that was on the market until I settled on LEVEL. Used to buy them religiously every month, on the small allowance that I was getting from the government for being in school.

CHIP computer hardware/software magazines were also stacked on my shelves and are probably responsible for much of my hardware knowledge, or at least were back then.

LEVEL also usually came with a full game on every edition. Sometimes it was pretty uninteresting, but most were OK. I've replaced almost all of them with GOG purchases (lugging entire bags of CDs around is hardly practical these days), but I still have a copy of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3! To be honest it was my only legal source of games outside of GOG and a few retail purchases, both of which came much later in my life.

I've kept a couple of the CDs, for the sake of nostalgia. See attached pictures :P.