I remember when the Unreal Tournament demo came out - it was supposed to be locked to owners of 3Dfx cards, but if you put an empty file in the game directory called glide2x.dll, it would run in a software-only renderer.

At the time, I worked for a company that had a large-ish computer training room. These weren't high-end machines, but they would run the Unreal demo, early Counterstrike (1.5-ish?), and Quake 1 just fine.

Around 4:30PM, a bunch of guys (30-ish and younger) in the building would gather in this room to play. This was totally unsanctioned by the company, and probably against some business policy there. The doors to the room would lock from the inside, and the two doors to the room had narrow windows. I cut a rectangular piece of cardboard that exactly fit these windows, painted them flat black, and we'd put them in the windows when we played - if people walked by, it looked like the lights were off in the room. We called these cutouts our "beatdown screens".

Those gaming sessions were some of the most fun I've had in a long time. At one point we may have had close to 20 people in the room. In the words of Penny Arcade, we were "Making punk bi*** suck it down".

Relevant PA links:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/12/20/a-threat-to-am... https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/11/19/with-special-g...

Good times.