CD-ROM was, to the entertainment industry, the equivalent of an ant getting hit by a violent supernova. It changed everything, and is now a sadly underrated, yet overused medium. CDs were, at first, simply digital music. Remember how they were packaged like they were events unto themselves (I suppose some of them were)? CDs came in those long, artsy boxes that had the album artwork expanded. They were even longer and more wasteful than today's DVD boxes. As a matter of fact, musician David Byrne once made it so that his album artwork was labeled "This is Garbage” on the longbox in protest of what he thought was wasteful packaging. It was, but I'll admit that for the sake of memories, I've had my eye on a copy of U2's "The Unforgettable Fire" on ebay, still in it's original longbox, for some time.
CD's were an amazing new digital medium. They had at least twice the fidelity of LPs (likely much more, although audiophiles still knock them as not producing that nostalgic pop and crackle sound, something I uderstand nad sympathize with) and no rewinding or strategic setting of the needle. Cassettes didn't dissappear overnight, but they got dirt cheap and were rendered obsolete almost overnight (or at least until CDs became cheaper). I remember my older brother buying his new stereo system somewhere around 1990 or 1991. We listened to Queen's "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions" all night, and he learned to put The Steve Miller Band's "The Joker" on repeat ad nauseum. This was new power, and the discs looked so . . . . . silvery, so shiny . . . so advanced. This was emphasized in ads for CD players, stereos, and especially in Sega CD ads in which seemingly label-less discs were shown peeking their heads out of the CD unit, and this shiny-ness was a selling point unto itself. Meanwhile, my brother Dan’s stereo system, still probably a decent system if it still worked, was the size of a dryer in the amount of space it and its massive speakers took up. Amazing.
On came CD-Roms. PC Games like The 7th Guest, Myst, the Doom series, and the Journeyman Project looked to the future. Videogame systems began to come out taking advantage of the medium as games were, for the first time, put on CD. Theses systems inlcuded the FM Towns and FM Towns Marty, the Turbo CD (PC-Engine CD in Japan), the Sega CD, the 3DO systems, and the CD-i systems, among other early entries. Let's not, of course, forget the mighty PC- CD-Rom drives that cost and arm and a leg and were, among my friends and I, spoken of in hushed circles. Even non-CD games began, like the TurboGrafx-16 games, to be packaged in ways that resembled CDs.
Early CD-ROM games weren't as impressive as people might have expected, but many still packed a punch, compared to the older games. The initial benifits, since most systems were still only 8- or 16-bit, came not in advanced 3D graphics so much as in longer length of games, more colors onscreen, full-motion video and animation, and sometimes ever so slightly crisper graphics, the result of a digital medium and one that could hold many times the amount of data of a cartridge, cassette, chip, or floppy disk could.
Full-motion video, in itself, became a revolution, although one whose underlying potential was put to rest mostly by lack of technology and lack of vision in many cases. The quality of many of these titles was horrible, but it would be hyperbole to deny that, for a brief, shining moment in the early nineties, the idea of “interactive cinema” was considered the wave of the future. Perhaps it would have been more so if the quality control had been better. Even so, the idea of controlling a movie only by pushing specific buttons at JUST the right time (reminicent of Dragon's Lair and Space Ace in the arcades on laserdisc, also enjoying a resurrection on the home market thanks to the storage power of CD) turned off many frustratted gamers not long after the initial novelty of the FMV visuals and REAL digitized speech wore off.
I remember reading about the gasps and the massive impressions felt and heard during a demonstration Sega gave for its new CD game "Sewer Shark" on Sega CD just before their mighty system hit the market. There really was excitement about all this. I also remember hanging out at a local game store early on, hearing the guys working there talking about this RPG that “talked” (it had real voices). I can’t remember which one it was, but, it was either Lunar on Sega CD or Ys Books I and II on the Turbo CD (Ys was the first ot have voices).
On the PC-CD-rom market, there was the groundbreaking 7th Guest, a still-decent game (although very dated) that combined advanced, crisp 3D visuals (albeit pre-rendered) with full-motion video of real actors and speech. This was revolutionary. The idea of real people coming from a videogame machine in full-motion (or at least at 24 frames/second) was unheard of. Sure, the Amiga computers of the late 80s and early 90s had animation equivalent to today's animated gifs showing motion in games like Crimewave, and Mortal Kombat has digitized actors, but this was FILM we were talking about. Videogames had attained the sensation of watching a movie, but your were in CONTROL . . . . . sort of. The HIGHLY controversial "Night Trap" came and sunk just about everybody's ship. The false statements made by politicians like our beloved pariah Joseph Lieberman and Tipper Gore about the action in the game caused its parent company, Digital Pictures (then headed by the affable Tom Zito, now hard at work as a photographer with his own studio) to go on the bliacklists of just about every middle class parent in America who could actually afford the game for their kids. Digital Pictures, and FMV in general, limped along into the mid 90's before losing favor quickly with gamers as new systems like the Playstation and Sega Saturn hit the market and FMV slowly became even more passe. The new systems had impressive "photorealistic graphics" and 3D polygons, but you were in control again. Still, "Night Trap" is a cult favorite (albeit a forgotten game), and it's not a bad game in and of itself. It is often (mistakenly) cited as the first game to use FMV, but it was one of the earliest.
CD technology has gone though many iterations up until now. Soon after it began to dominate the audio market, its inventor, Phillips, attempted to create a CD that would do for video what CD had done for sound. Thus, they unveiled the CD-i (or CD-interactive). This flopped big time, as did their system for playing these, the Phillips CD-i. Although slipping under the radar, one game in particular, “Voyeur,” gained notoriety for its adult nature and unique presentation and was banned in some countries, apart from being considered the CD-is showcase piece. It should be noted, however, that the CD-i format was a triumph of vision, and that were wasn't just one CD-i player. As with the 3DO, the CD-i was a technology (a medium) that could be licensed by multiple companies and systems, and not just one console. There were even video-only and portable CD-is that functioned more like VCRs or early DVD players. Big budget films saw release on CD-i, as they did earlier with laserdisc.
CDs have also embraced audio mediums such as SACD Audio, redbook (the original format), DCC audio (on 24 carrot gold discs), and DVD audio, among others.
In the video and video game front, CDs have become everything to GD-ROMS (for Sega's Dreamcast and NAOMI arcade boards), DVDs, minidiscs, miniDVDs (also used on the Nintendo Gamecube platform), CD+G, Blue-Ray (used by PS3 and suppodesly scratch-proof), HD-DVD (the loser in the HD DVD battle), CD-Rs (and DVD-Rs and RWs), UMDs (Sony's PSP), Photo CDs, HVD, Laserdiscs, SVCD, Video CDs . . . the list goes on and on.
In choosing my favorites of the massive CD games medium, I'll admit I have a bias to earlier games. In my defense, there is a reason for this. Necessity is the mother of invention. Because of the fact that the medium (the disc) was more "advanced" than the systems of the time (Sega CD and Turbo CD, MS-Dos, etc.) the games became lengthier in lieu of emphasis on making incredible graphics, putting emphasis on the gameplay and the 2d beauty of the graphics instead. This resulted in games of higher quality when quality control and vision shined through (which, in the early days rarely happened because of crappy quality control and because of the fact that progammers were just learning how to program for the massive new medium). The games became lengthier, prettier, and the soundtracks became scored by live musicians in studio recordings, often with full orchestral treatments. While not a real game music fan, it is always great to play a good CD-rom game with high quality music. I remember, for example, recently reading a blog in which a player commented that he got a copy of Beyond Shadowgate for the Turbo Duo system a week after buying the universally acclaimed Super Mario 64, and though Shadowgate was the best game he’d ever played. Thus, I choose games that stretched the then known capabilities of the medium. Games with “easter eggs” and lots of extras. Games that took existing franchises and injected new modes of play into them to take advantage of increased storage capacity. Games with massive sprites and beautiful 2D rendering. Games with fully-scored soundtracks. Games with replay value. Games with multiple endings. Games with crisper graphics. And much more.
An example of this, and one of my favorites: Sonic CD. When I was a kid, I would have died for that game. When I got it on Christmas day at age 13, I told my family (and was fully convinced) that the rest of my life lay in that shiny box. I had played it at the store (Ventura's Hi-Tech Center) on a massive TV and had caused my mom the trouble of having to rent it, along with a huge suitcase containing a Sega CD. The graphics just looked CRISPER (and it says so on the back of the box, right?). There weren't just a few bad guys. There were hundreds, in all different, crisp colors. When warping to thwe past, they looked shiny and new. When going into the future, they looked old and malfunctioned. The BOSS encounters were massive affairs and were far more elaborate than the old cartridge games. The backgrounds were crystalline and smooth, and the frame-rate, even when moving at light speed, seemed a consistent 60 FPS (even though it really wasn't.) time warping and added gameplay modes, along with a nice animated intro featuring FMV, sweetened the deal. Is it any surprise that in spite of all the more accessible and common cartridge classics, and despite the new 3D graphics, that this Sonic is most often voted the best of all of them? It is a HUGE game! Same with Twisted Metal 2. I remember telling my friends they filled that disc up to the maximum limit of storage space. So many easter eggs!
Get my point?
Then without further adieu: These, in my humble opinion, are the greatest works of gaming art ever committed to CD-ROM, at least in the early days:
(AHEM)
Sonic CD - Sega CD
Contra: Shattered Soldier - PS2
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – PSX
Full Throttle – PC CD-rom
Dracula X: Chi no Rondo - Turbo Super CD
Snatcher - Sega CD
Alundra - PSX
Lunar: The Silver Star - Sega CD
Policenauts – NEC PC-9821
Darkseed – PC CD-rom
Star Control II – 3DO
Metal Gear Solid – PSX
Final Fantasy VII – PSX
Grandia 2 – Dreamcast
Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth – PC CD-rom
Quake 4 – PC DVD
Rebel Assault – PC CD-rom
Diablo – PC CD-rom
Warcraft 2 – PC CD-rom
Beyond Shadowgate – Turbo Super CD
Silent Hill (series) – PSX, PS2, others
Doom II - PC-CDROM
Vagrant Story – PSX
Lunar 2: Eternal Blue – Sega CD
Einhander – PSX
Dark Forces – PC CD-rom
Twisted Metal 2 - PSX
Rayman - PSX
Doom 3 – PC DVD
Resident Evil - PSX
Quake - PC
Quake 2 - PC-CDROM
R-Type - Turbo CD
Gradius 2: Gofer's Ambition - Turbo CD
Metroid Prime - Gcube
Ys Books I and II - Turbo CD
Tie Fighter-X-Wing – PC CD-rom
There are many more, and I'll update this list as it gets bigger and I try more of these oldies.
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