Tbh, I don't remember any of the old Sierra and LucasArts adventures having a demo (unless you count playing an illegit copy without having the code tables from the manual as a demo). Did some of them actually have one? What about other famous adventure classics? Any demos?

Beneath a Steel Sky had a demo on the first issue of PC Gamer.

Sierra and LucasArts did release a lot of adventure games demo, and you can download them legally at https://www.scummvm.org/demos

Interesting, thanks! (Although many of them seem to be non-interactive, which I guess would be closer to the trailers and gameplay footage we have today than an actual demo.)

Flight of the Amazon Queen had one, too. (Dunno if it ever appeared on a PC Gamer disk, though. :P )

o_O
So...there was a second decade of the Nineties? Was it only for certain special people, and the rest of humanity went straight on to the '00s?

a VERY small handful did.

[most notably, space quest 6.]

what sierra tended to do, instead, was put out "demo reel disks" which would sort of showcase screens and a little bit of music from the game, etc, instead.

for my money, this was an "ok" way to do it. [how do you make a demo out of king's quest 2 - which is basically an open world king's quest? for example.]

Yes, although non-interactive demos do give some indication whether the game will run on your computer or not, unlike watching a video.

I'm so glad it's here, just got my Steam key from the Backerkit rewards! :)

I kickstarted the first campaign, more Quest for Glory like adventures yes! Can't wait to see how it compares to QfG.

The devs have been very active over at KS posts, posting updates all the time and the game was beta tested before being released so it shouldn't be buggy.

Hm, fair point. Could be $25 then I guess, though over $20 as full release price for this kind of game these days seems unreasonably high to me. (But, of course, my bigger beef with it are the regional price hikes.)
Few people think, few people care. Most fall for any marketing ploy, follow the crowd, their whims, only look in the short term, instant gratification much preferred, everything shallow and quick. And those who are in business for the business, for making money, not to promote certain ideals, perhaps using the business to fund those efforts, or who (*cough* *cough*) switch from the latter mindset to the former, they'll be catering to that crowd. Fickle, no loyalty or stability, but easy to get something off them and there's a whole lot of them. Those who care and consider things carefully may become loyal and bring stability if you convince them you're worth their time and money, but they're few and hard to please, so... What I already said, those in it for the money will pass over that crowd and join the others fighting over the masses. And for the masses those assessments are true.

Yep, thief just had 3 skills at 0, sacrifice 30 of the 50 skill points on activating them, since it took 15 to get each to 5, just had 5 left over for a little boost somewhere else, but after that you could max everything, impossible with any other class, then carry through your maxed character from one to the other. Sadly for some reason 4 didn't accept my maxed out char from 3, so that was where I stopped with the series. Changes brought in 4 rubbed me the wrong way already anyway, gave it a quick try with a new char but gave up quickly. And then remember reading the review for 5 from a gaming magazine from here and saying nope, that sounds even worse. Will always have fond memories of 2 and 3, and even of a couple of bits from 1, though.

Hm, only joins posts if the new one is within 10 min of originally posting the previous one, not also if within 10 min of the last edit?
Thought it'd join them...

Backers got alpha or beta access which is something completely different.

Nowadays most games don't have a demo because it's a lot of work to create one and most people just watch Let's Plays instead to checkout gameplay anyway (trailers are typically useless in this regard).

Putting all this extra work just to create a demo is hard to justify when instead you can (and have to) keep working on the actual game, fixing bugs, porting to different OS platforms etc.

Steam version runs with "OS X 10.9 Yosemite or newer" !!!!!!!!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/375440/HeroU_Rogue_to_Redemption/

WHY the gog version requires Mac OS 10.11 ???

I'm a backer (May 2015) and my personal download page links two (I'd say very minimalistic) demos (Oct 2013 & Apr 2015).

Waiting for my backer key too