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"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Gues
by beloch 2mo ago
"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). "
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The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year and a half before Quake 1. This was peak "Silliwood", when games started to use FMV cut-scenes starring bankable actors like Mark Hamill. Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast!
In the age before wikipedia or ubiquitous internet access, it was also pretty amazing to have access to a multimedia enhanced encyclopedia. Storing large amounts of data was still a tricky thing. It would take a few years for CD-R's to arrive, and there would be a plethora of competing technologies like Zip drives. Looking back, it seems like computer technology was moving especially fast in the 90's.
- NopIdoN 2mo agoRipper (1996) with Christopher Walken and Paul Giamatti came on 6 CDs
- jaggederest 2mo agoAlso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fork_in_the_Tale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fork_in_the_Tale - not a good game, but an impressive number of CDs at 5
- shmoe 2mo agoI miss the entire WC series... alot. I wish we could get something like that again today.
- beloch 2mo agoChris Roberts is still doing his thing. Elite:Dangerous is still getting updates and there's also Star Citizen/Squadron 42, both of which could either turn out to be epoch-defining or fusterclucks of truly epic proportions.
- Espressosaurus 2mo agoThe latter.
- ColdStream 2mo agoI find it so funny that there are new games that are are smaller than Wing Commander 3 despite the 32 year gap. To be fair, they obviously pack their data very differently.
- mook 2mo agoMeh, in the early days of DVDs I recall a game that came with uncompressed 48kHz audio. Compress it to mp3 (which the game naively accepted if you had the correct Windows filters) and it fits in a CD.
- beloch 2mo agoUncompressed audio tracks may have been necessary to get acceptable performance. e.g. GTA 1 came with some PCM tracks on the CD. If you didn't like them, you could pop in a different CD and get different music on the radio in-game. Playing mp3's was, in the early to mid-90's, actually pretty intensive. There were still a decent number of 386's around that could barely run a mp3 player in a Linux console-only setup. You needed a 486 or better to even think about playing mp3's with a full graphical OS running, and probably a Pentium before you have enough CPU left over for the rest of a game.
- danielheath 2mo agoBack in the day, my 200mhz Pentium remained just-barely usable while listening to WinAmp, but there was noticeable latency.
- Espressosaurus 2mo agoYeah, I remember an mp3 rating >50% CPU time on one of those early pentiums we had
- vanviegen 2mo agoYeah. Seeing that made me very happy, being the proud owner of a dual CPU (no, not dual core!) AMD K6. :-)
- gbil 2mo agoAh Phantasmagoria, that was an interesting case with my CDROM drive at the time, I think it was a Mitsumi one and there was a compatibility issue with specific discs from the 7disc bundle, so I buy the game, going home and start playing with some friends - that was common practice back then - we finish day 1 and I enter the 2nd disc and the FMV is choppy as hell! Try again and again and again and I assume the disc is problematic, so we go back to the shop and they ask what CDROM drive I have, I say Mitsumi and they tell me that it is a known issue with some drives and there is no workaround, so they offer to exchange the game for a different one, oh this "Harvester" game looks intriguing :) Fun times!
- raverbashing 2mo agoThank you for playing Wing Commander!
- 4thguy 2mo agoThe most polite error message ever
- anonzzzies 2mo agoWhen I was in university living in some crappy room at a friend of my parents, it was freezing and there were some transportation issues because of it, so I didn't go to classes and was bored around programming (I wrote Pascal those days for fun and profit), so a struggled to the closest shop to ask what's interesting; Phantasmagoria it was. Good memories playing that one on that massively heavy monitor that was normal back then, under the blankets with ice on the inside of the windows and on top of the blanket.
- epihelix 2mo agoMyst was the CD-ROM killer game for me. And yes, I think we both lived through the most rapid period of technological change (so far). Moore's law was real, the improvements each year were both felt and needed, and the software was coming along for the ride. Quake was huge when it was launched - there'd never been anything like it. Of course, on my crappy Cyrix 6x86 and some similarly lame graphics card, I recall having to play it at something like 15fps. That wasn't great.
- fizzbuzzbarbazz 2mo ago..so.. ..you know about RealMyst, right? A 3d first-person adaptation of the original Myst?
- seritools 2mo agoWhat's the point you're trying to make?
- lobsterthief 2mo agoI think they were just excited to share that a newer game exists, given OC was posting how they liked it.
- TylerE 2mo agoFor very small values of newer. There have been two remakes of Myst since then.
- returnorthrow 2mo agoI too was in the Cyrix camp when Quake came out. My first video card was a Permedia 2. It ran GLQuake when that came down the pipe but not very well. The Christmas when I got my 3dfx Voodoo1 card was magical.
- austin-cheney 2mo agoThe first CD-ROM gaming experience I remember was the Turbo Duo console from late 1991. It came with 2 disks of games. The first and primary disk contained Bonk I, Bonk II, Gates of Thunder, and a hidden Bomberman 3. The second disk contained a combined Y's I and Y's II. The Y's combo really stood out. You have to understand that late 1991 was still the age of 8-bit NES gaming. This game was very much an 8-bit game that could have run on the NEW and yet it also contained almost DVD quality animated cut-scenes with top quality digital audio. It really felt next level, because the quality of audio was like a studio music album and the animation quality was better than what was on television at the time. It really felt next level compared to the NES.
- xtiansimon 2mo ago> “In the age before … ubiquitous internet access” For some bizarre reason when upgrading from the family Mac SE to a Quadra, I had an idea in my head cd-rom drive was unnecessary. Thankfully in less than ten years I was proven correct. Obviously I didn’t play enough games.
- sporkland 2mo agoFor me the music on the Monkey Island CD-ROM remaster was a real jaw dropper.
- oniony 2mo agoRemember the Commodore CDTV, which came out at the height of the "multimedia" hype: https://obsoletemedia.org/commodore-cdtv/ https://obsoletemedia.org/commodore-cdtv/.
- guhcampos 2mo ago"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " To me the Saturn made the absolute best choice. The whole game's OST would be burned as audio tracks. I used to - and still can - just drop a game CD into an audio player and enjoy emblematic OST's like Daytona USA, Sonic R and many others in full 44100Hz 16bit audio. I recall a few PC games did that too: Total Annihilation comes to mind: I also still own the physical media and still can listen to the OST that way.
- Xirdus 2mo agoPlayStation games had that too - not sure if all, but at least some of them. It was especially funny if the game disk failed to load as a game, but opened just fine in the PlayStation's built-in music player.
- Cpoll 2mo ago> not sure if all A fair amount, but far from all of them. AFAIR it was largely a technical decision with trade-offs; games that did it could offer CD-quality music, but wouldn't be able to read data from the disk and play music simultaneously.
- project2501 2mo agoIIRC, the Quake 1 CD also had its OST as standard audio tracks Quake 2 had it for sure, that CD spent as much time in my car as in my PC
- user_of_the_wek 2mo ago> like Mark Hamill I just wanted to add, it also had John Rhys-Davies and Malcom McDowell! Crazy cast for a video game, especially back then. And these were not „just“ voice roles.
- MBCook 2mo agoI hated Malcom McDowell for years because of the game. Probably one of the first celebrities I had a strong opinion about.
- otabdeveloper4 2mo ago> Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast! SNES games aged a lot less than those silly DOS games. (I mean that SNES games look more sleek and "modern" today.)
- MBCook 2mo agoGood art lasts. Some early PS games are truly awful. Realism of people especially didn’t work. Others still look great. Ridge Racer, PaRappa, Jumping Flash, Ape Escape. Same reason Mario 64 still looks good and Goldeneye doesn’t.
- MBCook 2mo agoRebel Assault was the first to blow my mind. I had to have that game. That and the fully voiced version of Day of the Tentacle.