Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 100: The advent of CD-ROM gaming

Episode Date: May 22, 2017

For our 100th full episode since our crowdfunded relaunch, we complete a long-overdue Kickstarter obligation by inviting backer Daniel Hawks to join us in a discussion of the early days and notable landmarks of CD-ROM gaming.

This episode is brought to you by Audible, the audio book service with more than 180,000 titles to choose from. Get a free audiobook and a 30-day trial at audibletrial.com slash game. This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by Barkbox.com. Get one free extra month of Barkbox at Get Barkbox.com slash game. This week in Retronauts, we get CD. CD-ROM, that is. Hi, everyone, and welcome to an episode of Retronauts. I don't know if this is actually going to be a full Retronaut or a Retronauts micro.

We're going to kind of play it by ear. And I would say at the end, you'll be surprised. but we're going to be the ones who are surprised. You will already know because you will have downloaded this from the internet and it will clearly be demarcated. So I guess that kind of takes the mystery out of everything, but at least we can all have fun together, right? That's what it's all about.

Anyway, this is a special episode of Retronauts because this is completing one of our long-standing, maybe our final Kickstarter obligation. We have a guest here who paid four years ago to be a co-host on the show and finally managed to make it all work out. I'm glad wrapping this conversation in a hotel room and not in court. So, yeah, so why don't you introduce yourself and explain why you're so tardy? Hi, my name is Daniel Hawks.

I am a retro gaming enthusiast. Those are my only qualifications to be on this show. That in like $250? I think it was $300. $300, man, wow, that was harsh. You know, it's been four years, so the VIG has been running. I think it's like up of, you know, 400 in today's dollars. Okay.

Yeah, we're at Midwest Gaming Classic, and this was just an opportune place for us to meet and make this happen. Yeah, San Francisco is a long way for you to come because you live in St. Louis. That's correct. Yeah, so I guess it makes more sense, Milwaukee versus San Francisco, although I will say I like San Francisco better. But what can you do? So Daniel put together a few different ideas for us to talk about. And some of them, I don't think Bob and I were really qualified for, like being gamers with kids. I don't have children.

I have JRPs I play instead of children. You have Louis. I have a bird, right? He's an internal two-year-old, I have nephews, but I don't really game with them. They basically watch Minecraft videos at me. It's not quite the same. But instead, we decided to talk about the advent of the CD-ROM format and CD-ROM gaming. And so that's what we're going to do.

Anyway, hi, this is Retronauts, and I am Jeremy Parrish, your co-host. And with me here is... I'm Bob Mackey, and I was just a... costed by a cruel Midwest Gaming Classic attendee. Wow. Yes, I want this on tape, recorded for posterity, but that was the one mean person I met in four years of doing this. So don't be a dick is what I'm saying.

Gosh. I was there with Bob. I witnessed the incident. It was harrowing. Yeah. Bob, you know, punch is thrown? No.

Bob did a really good job of keeping his composure and, you know, being the bigger man. There's a steely glint in his eyes, though. Like, I can see the anger. Yeah. Don't make me angry. I will curl into a ball and cause a scene. So, yes. Anyway, I'm happy that we are finally wrapping up this Kickstarter obligation. And I think this is a good time to wrap up all of our Kickstarter obligations. So by the time this goes out, the final piece in the Kickstarter obligation puzzle will be complete.

The CD-ROM, or DVD-ROM, sorry, the DVD. Yes, we're talking about CD-ROM, but we are sending out DVDs. So those will have been produced and hopefully we'll be in the mail very soon. Yeah. So then everything will be great and we can move along to a happy new era of talking about old video games. Yeah. And I'll stop seeing Reddit comments that are like, didn't they rip everybody off? Yes, we totally did. Go to Tijuana. Oh man, I wish. I went to nowhere. I went to North Carolina. That's a Tijuana. That's a point of a destination. Yes. So anyway, Daniel, why did you tell us a little bit a bit about yourself beyond, you know, what little glib you, comment you made there before. Like, what, what interested you in this particular topic? Yeah. So I think Jeremy and I are

roughly the same age. And so, you know, this, this topic in particular was interesting to me because it was sort of a period in my life where, you know, I was kind of earning my own money and I was interested in games and I guess the way that I would describe it is when games started coming out on CD, it was sort of like what I imagine, you know, people seeing their first talkie was like, you know, with movies. It's funny you mention that because the early LucasArts adventure games with audio were called talkies. Like this is a talkie, this is the talkie version. So they did borrow that terminology back then too. Well, there you go.

And then, you know, I'm a software. person by trade, software product manager, nothing to do with games. But it, you know, from a sort of technologist standpoint, I think it's a really interesting topic just because of the way that it, it changed the landscape and it kind of pushed the, you know, the medium forward. So when you, when you say this era, you know, you're talking about you're buying video games and stuff, what exactly do you mean? Because the advent of CD-ROM did not happen all at once. It was sort of a slow, gradual rollout. I mean, heck, it took Nintendo like an extra 10 years to get there.

But, you know, you look at CD-ROM as a format. That really started to kind of take off for PCs and the – it started to appear in the late 80s, but really became a commercial viable format in the early 90s. But then, you know, you had sort of the mainstreaming of CD-based systems in 1995 with the PlayStation and Saturn. Yeah. So for me, this is that sort of middle era where CDs had been around for a few years, but really they were kind of, you know, those what I'd call the killer apps started appearing on the market. So like 92, 93. But what was interesting about it is that, you know, you didn't see a lot of PCs that came with CD ROM drives at that point. So it was, you know, you know, add-on hardware, and it was typically, you know, really expensive. Yeah, I, I wasn't there at the beginning of the CD-ROM revolution, but, you know, the multimedia revolution, but did jump in pretty early because I had just graduated from high school in 1993, and my parents said, you know, we can, as a gift, we can give you either help you pay for a car or help you buy a computer. And I said, of course, I want the computer. I want to get chicks, Mom.

That's step number one. I got to get me an LC3. I got to get me a Macintosh. So that's what I did, as I took the money that I earned with my summer jobs and combined it with their gift and bought a Macintosh, which did not come with a CD-ROM.

What it did come with was a 40-Magabyte hard drive, which, wow. How could you ever fill that up? Capacious. But actually, no, it filled up pretty quickly. And so I immediately, you know, began looking at ways to expand the system. one of the first ways, you know, I spent a few hundred dollars on like four megabytes or maybe two megabytes of RAM and then also bought a CD-ROM like 2X drive with some speakers and a copy of MIST because it was the hot new thing.

And that was probably, I want to say, toward the end of 1994, might have been 93. I can't remember when exactly this happened. But, you know, MIST was brand new at the time. So base it on that. And yeah, it really did make a huge difference. Like it expanded the capabilities and potential of my computer massively. And I think you kind of touched on a key point there. And that is that, you know, not only did CDs, you know, give developers all this extra storage space to work with so that they could do things like full motion video,

But it also, what you saw is that most computers at the time didn't have built-in sound cards. So, you know, when you went to buy, you know, a CD add-on, it typically came bundled with a sound card. And so I think that was just... In ad lib, in my case, it was a creative lab. I do remember the days of having to calibrate your sound card and choosing all the different things that I did. Like, what's the IRQ address or whatever? Are these real terms I'm using? I don't know, but...

I think IRQ is, uh-oh. Yeah. You had that, like, put in every value. ICQ, yeah. But it was, like, it was just bizarre just to do that over and over again for different, you know, games that required sound cards. Yeah, but I think, I think, you know, once, you know, the sound card was sort of part of the equation, I think that also gave, you know, developers a way to start, you know, adding this, you know, next level production value to, to their games. in sound effects and music. Yeah, publishers and developers and manufacturers all like just licked their lips at the prospect of CD-ROM.

I mean, I think to really understand the importance of CD-ROM, you have to look back to sort of the early days of computing. And, you know, in the video game space, mask-ROM silicon chips, you know, those were the standard. They made a lot of sense because they were low capacity, but they were very durable. Like you could, you know, a little kid could slam them into a system. and they're not going to break or bend unless you, like, take a hammer to them. They're very durable. And, you know, video games were sort of a read-only application for the most part. So it made sense to use those for consoles, but that was not the only storage format available.

There were also, you know, magnetic media like discets and tape cassettes and hard drives. And all of those had their ups and their downs. Like hard drives were fast and they had high capacity, but they were very expensive. Desquettes were pretty low capacity, but they were very, very, very cheap. Tape cassettes were very, very, very cheap, but extremely slow and extremely unreliable. And so everyone, you know, who made hardware had to make a trade-off. They had to say, like, which format are we going to support and, you know, what impact will this have on our system? You know, I think a lot of, say, like, you know, British computers of the 80s were really defined by the fact that they

mostly used cassette tapes because that allowed them to release, you know, publishers to release games cheaply. Like British games were very cheap on Spectrum or Amstrad CPC or whatever, but, you know, you had these incredible loading times. So it, that was kind of the experience was like lots of loading, but, you know, you could just buy games by the dozen. And it was, it was low cost. Whereas, you know, on NES or Super Nintendo or Genesis, games were very expensive, but they were just like these fast instant experiences where you plugged it in and you know you were gaming right away. Yeah.

And, you know, I think it might be, you know, sort of relevant to talk about kind of what was the standard before, you know, software was distributed on CD. So in the PC space, you're talking about floppy disks, which hold, you know, roughly one and a half. Or to a small degree of cassettes, but mostly floppy disks. Right. And, you know, I think,

the biggest game that I ever had on floppy was Kingsquest 6, and I think it came on like 16 floppies. Yeah, towards the end, towards the crossover period where there were discite games and CD-ROM games, they would come in like on a big rubber band bundle of nothing but discs. Yeah, so you'd end up, you know, buying this boxed product with, you know, that weighs like three pounds. It's got all these flopsets inside. That's where the boxes were so big, right. Yeah. Right.

And, you know, by comparison, a single CD-ROM could hold the equivalent of, what's the math there. One point four megabytes. I don't know. Yeah, like about, about 400, 50, I think. That's a lot of discets. And the cost of manufacturing a CD was very, very inexpensive. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. I mean, at the time, maybe it was like a dollar. Now it's pennies or less, but, you know, that's over time. But even so, manufacturing a discette was much more expensive because they had multiple moving parts. You had, you know, the plastic case, you had the metal, um, protection. you had the spindle, and you had the disc itself. Yeah, the spring. So, like, those are a lot of mechanical moving parts. The disc, the CD-ROM was plastic and aluminum sandwiched together. And then, you know, like a silk screen print over top. That's it. Very, very inexpensive to make. And CD-ROM was extremely durable. I mean, not as much as, you know, a silicon cartridge. But unless you scratched up the disc, like, it wasn't fragile in the way that it magnetic media was. You could run it over a bulk eraser and it wouldn't affect the CD-ROM at all. So there was

much less fragility to it. It was also read only, which meant that, you know, eventually you got CD writers, but initially they were very expensive. Yeah. And software piracy. So that would, yeah, take a big bite out of software piracy. Right. I, you know, I will confess that, you know, I had a number of copied, you know, floppy games when I was a kid. This is a sting, by the way. We were waiting for that. You're on to me. But yeah, I mean, I was talking with about the CDI today at lunch and it was like there was no copy protection because I'm sure they assumed maybe the children of

parents who own CD burning factories could pirate games, but that was off the table for any regular consumer. Yeah, and it wasn't like you could upload your CD-ROM to a BBS. Here's my ISO of Shelley DeValls to Bird's life. It was, it was, it was, it would have taken you long enough to download

you know, 1.4 megabytes of discet over a 2,800 bond modem, but forget about 650 megabytes. That was impossible. You never download that much info. And I think, you know, kind of given, you know, some of the statistics that we've thrown out where, you know, you had a 40-meg hard drive in your first computer. So, you know, if a developer is putting a game on a CD, unlike floppy disks, it's not to install the entire game onto the hard drive.

So with that came, you know, some real technical challenges where, you know, they're having to stream data off of the disc in real time, and I think that, you know, that was one of the biggest limitors for the technology. Yeah, I mean, in a way, I guess it kind of makes sense that CD-ROM was suffering from some of the same limitations as tape cassettes, because really both were formats designed for music, and the idea behind music is that you listen to it straight through. You start at the beginning, and you listen to the end of the song. And CD-ROM allowed you to jump forward to the next track. But, you know, a tape cassette would let you fast forward also.

But that was very different than the sort of nonlinear reads that you required for a hard driver at Desquette. And, yeah, at first, CD-ROMs were extremely slow to access information. They were still faster than cassettes. So, you know, in that sense, it was an upgrade. But you did have that trade-off with the single-speed CD-ROMs that you were going to have some wait times for sure. Yeah, and that term single speed, so I wasn't aware of this until, you know, started reading into the show notes that you put together, but single speed refers to the access speed of the drive pulling data off the disc.

And what it means is, I wasn't aware of this, but CD-ROM is the exact same format as music CDs. And so single-speed is at the same speed as a music CD. Right. And you hear things like Red Book and Yellow Book, and those are references to, standards that were developed. So the CD-ROM or the CD was developed as a joint venture between, I want to say, Phillips and RCA, MCA, RCA, I think. I can't remember exactly. But, you know, they put together this digital format and it was designed initially for music, but it didn't take long for people to

realize, like, you know, we're turning everything into ones and zeros, or transcoding music as digital data. So this doesn't have to work for just music. It can also work for storing data. And it can work differently than a cassette where you have like ones and zeros played back as a stream of noise. This can actually just be, you know,

ones and zero is a laser reading it like a circuit. And one of the other advantages is that because, you know, the music CD format and, you know, production facilities were already there, you know, publishers could piggyback off of that. And be able to produce, CD-ROMs in mass because, you know, the laser writers were already there for writing music. Right. So when they started putting together the specifications for the format, they sat down and

in a sort of rare case of like multiple industries coming together and saying, hey, let's make something that makes sense for everyone. They sat down and put together separate standards. And each of them were defined by technical notes in a different colored binder. with the group, which is like super, I don't know, you talk about like Red Book and Yellow Book, and it sounds, it sounds so arcane. You're like, what does that mean? But it literally just means that the people who put together the specifications put them in this color of a binder. So Red Book Audio is, you know, the CD format, like the music format. Yellow Book Audio is using like streaming music as data and it has to be interpreted. Green Book is C.D.

is CDI, and there's several other formats. There's no Lisa Frank book because it predated that. Exactly. Yeah, I wasn't aware that CDI was a completely separate format. It was, and actually, I remember sometime in the 90s I had, I want to say, like, quick time or something on my computer was capable of reading the CDI format, but not like the CDI, you know, video games that appeared on the CDI console, but rather the CDI. standard, which was sort of an interactive, like a cross between data and multimedia. But it was, yeah, like that was kind of the monkey wrench and things. Like at the last minute, Phillips was like, oh, hey, check it out.

We made this other format that's kind of competing with CD-ROM. Sort of like VHS or beta or divix or D. Basically, like everything was going so smoothly until Phillips had to be dicks about it. And then, you know, that would happen later with a supernious CD-ROM. Philip stepped in again and everything went to hell. But those, those, what country is that anyway? The Netherlands. Yeah.

Those nether people. The nether people. Those people from the nether regions. Yeah. So, so, you know, that was kind of the weird hiccup. But aside from that, the establishment of the CD-ROM format for multiple purposes went pretty smoothly. And it took several years for it to. to sort of come into being.

I'm trying to think. CD audio players began to appear in Japan in 1982. Oh, wow. And, you know, they started to kind of appear in other countries a few years later, or I guess in 1983. And you started to see actual CD, you know, discs to buy sometime after that. But they were pretty uncommon. Yeah, I think it was mostly an audio file, you know, format. Most people were still buying music.

on you know vinyl and cassette right yeah i mean it was it was very much audiophile um it wasn't until the very end of the 90s that it started to become really common The CD-ROM format took longer to come together, and I don't think that really started to appear until 1986, 87. And let's see. I think you got your first real applications designed specifically for CD-ROM in, like, 1989. I put it in the notes. Let's see. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The very first PC game to be distributed on CD-ROM, it was one of those that was on CD-ROM or discette, was the manhole by Sion, the people who would go on to create MIST, and that appeared in 1989, early 1989. So as it turns out, the CD-ROM format was actually, actually made its debut not for computers, but for video game consoles, because NEC released the PC Engine Duo, not the Duo, but the CD-ROM 2 format for the PC Engine turbographics in December 1988. I find that astounding because I just associate CD-ROM games with the early 90s, and I know 88 isn't too far behind that, but just the idea that that was happening back then is pretty crazy to me. It was happening in Japan. Yeah. Not here. Right. The disconnect between the PC

engine market and the turbo graphics market has a lot to do with the fact that no one in America really cares about turbographics, whereas PC engine for a while was actually outselling Famicom and Mega Drive. Like, it was a big deal. So do you know kind of what types of games they were making back then? Because, you know, I think we can all sort of think about you know, early FMV-type games, you know, that we saw here in the U.S. But, you know, in 88, what kind of games were they making? Well, one of the very first games, but the first two games they made, I can't remember. One of them was a very Japanese game that I couldn't find any information about.

I didn't really look that hard. But the other one was a little game called Fighting Street, which you may know as Street Fighter. I don't know why they changed the name, but they did. But, yes, the original Street Fighter, not Street Fighter 2. the one where Ryu has red shoes, that came to the CD-ROM format as one of the launch games. So that's part of Street Fighter's legacy

that no one really thinks or knows about is that it was one of the very first, the first two CD-ROM-based video games ever. I think a lot of these games were just standard PC engine games but with much better music, usually. I mean, they didn't do anything with video early on or anything like that.

Not initially. Yeah. Yeah, I think early on with CD-ROM, You kind of saw games falling into two categories, you know, one where, you know, other than the fact that it had, you know, really high fidelity audio, it didn't need to be on CD. And then you have things that were designed specifically to be on CD, maybe to, you know, it's detriment where, you know, the game ended up being really, you know, boring or, you know, not interactive because they were trying so hard to, you know, shoehorn in, you know, the full motion video. It was a bumpy start, but in a way, it actually makes sense that, or I guess it's not so bizarre that the first CD-ROM games were for a console, because the idea of sort of add-on expansions to consoles that sort of push those consoles into a bit of a computer space and push them beyond ROM cartridges wasn't new. you had the StarPath Supercharger for Atari 2,600 in like 1982, where you could basically plug in a cartridge that could play cassettes

and used magnetic media. You had, you know, Colico with the atom that could use either discats. It would like turn the Colico vision into a computer that could use either discats or a tape cassette. And of course, you had the Famicom Disc System, which was a pretty big success for Nintendo, but only happened in Japan, and that was using, like, literally a 3-inch disk, not a 3.5-inch disk, but something, a very similar format, a semi-standard format, to add on to the NES, the Japanese NES, and lots of games were released exclusively for the Famicom disk system. I think that's a really good point, and I hadn't really considered that,

but, you know, there were a lot of technical challenges, you know, developing games for CD-ROM, on PC, and part of that was because you had such a wide variety of, you know, technical specifications in people's machines. So, you know, doing it on console, at least you know that everybody has the same baseline hardware with the same capabilities. So if they could do it, then, you know, they know that it's going to work on everybody's machine. Yeah, you didn't have to calib for the, you know, the ad lib or whatever. Yeah, I remember hearing horror stories, and I think it was the Christmas of 1994 where Disney interaction. Whoever was publishing Disney games, released some Lion King CD-ROM thing for PCs, and it had a ton of incompatibility issues.

So it was like they basically ruined Christmas for children. It was such a big story that news magazines were covering it. I was seeing it in like actual magazines. So yeah, that was an issue. Yeah, the 11th hour, the sequel to seventh guest, which is a game I really want to talk about, you know, a little bit later, was notorious, you know, in the same way where, you know, like half of the people who, you know, bought the game and trying to install it had had issues because of...

Was the sequel Phantasmagoria? Different series. Okay. Yeah. I'm trying to just remember what game that was. Yeah. SQL 7th guest, 11th hour. Oh, 11th hour. That's it.

Okay. Ah, yes. Yeah, I mean, that definitely is something you didn't have to deal with with consoles because it was a standard hardware spec. It's also worth mentioning that CD-ROM was not a given as the next, you know, the successor of

of video game format technology. You had people experimenting with a lot of different ideas. You had Hasbro developed the Nemo system, which would have used VHS tape. And that's actually where Nighttrap came from. So that was a Nemo? It was a Nemo game originally. I didn't know the name of the platform. I knew they were all VHS games.

That had in like Sewer Shark and maybe one other one. A bunch of the early Sega CD games initially started out as VHS-based games. I guess that would have worked like Captain Power or something? I don't know. I really want to know how Nighttrap would work on a VHS tape because it's all about switching between different video feeds and you have to switch fast. So I'm just curious as to how that would actually function

with physical media like that. On a CD, it makes sense because you have the ability to track. But on a tape, you're having to, you know, rewind and fast forward to get to the right section. I don't know. That is a question that someone smarter than me can answer. You would hear a lot of worrying. heads worrying around. On either format, it's a crappy game. Oh, yeah, for sure. You also had people

looking into the possibility of using laser disks for games, and, you know, that had had its sort of advent in the arcades with Dragons Layer and Space Ace and Cliffhanger and some other games. You know, Sega, we mentioned in a Retronauts East recently, had a racing game. I can't even remember its name, but it used, like, streaming scenery. It's not Road Blasters, but it looks great. It's all first person animated. Am I thinking of the right one? No, you're not. Okay, do you know what I'm talking about?

I don't. It's a Laserdisc game where it's anime, but it's all hand-drawn animation from behind the wheel of a car and you're going out of a road. This isn't that one. I don't, but I think you're kind of triggering something in me. And that's, you know, when you say it looks great, you have to think that in the early 90s, you know, when you were finding out about new games, it was typically in print media. So you would see these still shots of these incredible looking games, you know, without really any knowledge of, like, how crappy they play.

What do they look like in motion? Yeah, what the experience was. So, you know, I think for me, it was, you know, it was a case where I associated CD-ROM with amazing graphics. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually called Road Blaster, and I encourage all of our listeners. Just watch a 20 minute. One, just only one. Okay.

So just the confusion. Go on to YouTube. just watch the 20 minutes of animation. It is just, somebody killed themselves to make this. It just looks so good. So I think CD-ROM ultimately won out because it had a lot of advantages. compact format, but, you know, it piggybacked on a technology that was already beginning to burgeon. Yeah, almost like a commodity hardware.

Yeah, like, because it was built on the sort of the backbone of, you know, this popular music format that was going to, you know, it was just on the cusp of taking off and replacing cassettes and eight tracks and vinyl. Well, I think with all, you know, media formats, a lot of times it's just sort of like which players get on board, you know, and clearly CEDA. Well, everyone was on board with CD-ROM, except with the exception of Philips. But even Phillips was on CD-ROM because C-D-ROMB, Phillips helped develop the CD-ROM spec. They just kind of wanted to do it their own way.

But I'm pretty sure that CDI also, like the CD-I console, supported CD-ROM and, like, CD-M music. Oh, interesting. So they were trying to kind of wing it and push things their own way, but didn't quite work out. Yeah, like, Phillips and Sony, I can see where they would both be competitors. for the Super Nintendo add-on because both of them love to do proprietary formats and take, you know, kind of like piggyback

on sort of an industry-wide push and say, no, no, do it our way. So you do have that sort of in common. So again, the NEC PC engine, CD-ROM 2, debuted in 1988, and the first games were Fighting Street in something called Noriko. I don't know what that is. I thought that was one of those idle-style games

where you just sort, it's like an idle fan game. It could be. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is. And that, you know, that also had its tradition because there were a lot of games based around idols happening on the Famicom Disc system, as a matter of fact. Like, what's her name? Something Miho's doki-dokey high school, which was like an adventure game, kind of like, you know, Tokomeky Memorial.

But you, like, ultimately were trying to win a date. with this flavor of the month music idol. There was a phone number you could call? Yeah. Yeah, Noriko is definitely an idle game. Okay, very much in that vein. So, yeah, what you kind of saw here was CD-ROM sort of taking the place of the add-on disk system in the Japanese market. And, you know, like I said, the PC engine, PC-engine duo, et cetera, sort of supplanted the Famicom for a while as the most popular system over there.

And it kind of makes sense. you have like this actual line of succession happening there. But of course, we didn't see that here. And I think for the most part, Americans associate CD-ROM with PC gaming. I certainly do. Like, yeah, I mean, eventually I would use, you know, PlayStation and Saturn. Those were CD-based. But until that point, you know, I was aware of the turbo CD and the Sega CD,

but they didn't really have that much interest for me until much later. but, you know, CD-ROM for my Macintosh, like, I was all over that. So there are four different sort of notable formats that I would like to talk about in terms of CD-ROM games, early CD-ROM games. We've talked a little bit about PC Engine CD-ROM 2, but I'd kind of like to go a little more into detail on that, because I would say of all the CD-ROM expansions and add-ons, it definitely, like those early CD-based game systems,

I would say that's where the greatest amount of quality content was, especially, I mean, if you look to Japan, not that much great stuff made it to the U.S. But the Japanese market for PC engine, CD-ROM was amazing. Yeah, in this case, I don't think the format was detrimental to game design, as it would be later, you know, just we would see it affect game design in a huge way going to the 90s. But at this point, I think they were kind of conservative with how they used the format while still making it impressive. Yeah, there were some interesting things about the,

PC Engine CD-ROM. For one thing, it didn't really significantly add base capabilities to the hardware. Like, it had no extra RAM, no extra processing power. It just gave people more capacity and the ability to play live music. But also, that's not 100% true because the PC Engine CD-ROM had memory cards, like system cards, and I think there were three or four of them released. And each of them did, like you could plug it in like a Hucard, like the standard cartridge games, and it would actually increase the capabilities of the systems that way.

Sort of like the Nintendo 64's RAM expansion type. Yeah, except, you know, constantly changing. And so what you ended up with was certain games that required specific system cards. Like Dracula X is one of the more famous ones. If you put in the wrong system card, then it won't run. but you can play like this cutesy little kind of a parody game almost that's like a bunch of little cutesy doodles. So, yeah, there's like, there's actually, you know, I think VGmuseum.com put together a huge, huge catalog. I have seen those.

Yeah. Oh, a few months ago. The warning screens. Yeah, that's great. But there's more to, like, some of the games, it was just a warning screen, but some of them put, you know, the developers put so much effort into it. I didn't know what 99% of those games were, but it was still fascinating to see. Yeah, I mean, the CD-ROM 2 had a huge library. You don't get quite the same effect if you go to a retro gaming shop in Japan now

because it's been picked over, they've all been picked over pretty badly. But up until a few years ago, you would go to a, you know, like a super potato or something like that, and there'd be just an entire wall of PC engine CDs. So many games and just all kinds of treasures to be found. also all kinds of garbage to be found. Like, you know, that's kind of the way it goes. But there's some really, really great stuff that came out for that system. So I guess the hardware must have done fairly well if there were that many games developed for it.

Yeah. So the PC engine came out in 1987. The CD-ROM came out at the end of 1988. And within probably two years, the CD-ROM had eclipsed the base hardware as the format of choice. By 1992, you were basically seeing everything on CD-ROM, no hue cards, because the hugh cards just didn't have enough memory capacity to keep up with the growing standards of games. So, yeah, like the CD-ROM 2 basically became the standard for NEC games. And, you know, they actually tried to release a better system called the Super Graphics

that would have been more ROM-based as opposed to CD-ROM based, and no one bought it. Everyone just was like, no, we have our CD-ROM games, and these are great, and we've kind of picked this as our format. And it was very, very successful. Are there five super graphics games? I think six. Okay. Yeah, I know there was a horribly small amount of that. Yeah, it's not very many. But they're all very expensive. So even though you would think, I have six games, I can get a complete collection. No, you actually can't. Is one of those ghosts and goblins? I believe so. Okay, wow. Capcom was a heavy supporter. I think one of them was in 1944, Kye. and then there's like I think some vaguely pornographic adventure game or something I can't remember exactly but some of those games are very very pricey so it's kind of like virtual boy

where you're like oh that'll be easy to complete that collection if I'm extremely rich got a shell up for Jack Brothers yeah basically so yeah I don't know if you guys have much experience with the CD-ROM 2 have you done much gaming on that system not really I mean it was this extremely

impressive thing to me as a kid, but I figured it's too expensive. I don't know. I forget how much these retailed for, but CD-ROM technology early on, like as with DVDs and Blu-Rays, it was very expensive. It was like a boutique experience for a pro person to indulge in. Yeah, I mean, we look at

the CDI console and the 3D console and are like, whoa, those are so expensive. How did anyone buy those? But that was the cost of entry for one of these systems. Like a Sega Genesis plus Sega CD was going to run you like $5 or $600. And it's just crazy to kind of look back at this, you know, through kind of a historical lens and think that, you know, any company thought that it was a good idea to release some add-on peripheral, you know, that costs, you know, hundreds and hundreds of dollars when, you know, the target demographic at the time was, you know, kids.

But you have to understand that at the time Japan was at the bubbliest part of its bubble economy. Like, there was just money to, I mean, you know, people were releasing VHS tapes with 30 minutes of anime, and it cost $100. Yeah, kids had really big allowances back then in Japan. They must have, or their parents just bought stuff for them. Yeah. Yeah, I don't even know. Like, it was, like, peak capitalism right there. You should really play Yakuza Zero if you're interested in this era in Japan, because they make fun of it, and that whenever you beat up people, cash flies out of them. Yeah, it's like $1,000, $1,000 flies out of their pockets.

It's so great, yeah. But yeah, some of the games that sort of the system build its reputation on are all-time classics. I mean, I think most Americans kind of, if they had a turbo CD, they know it for East Books 1 and 2, which were, you know, it was a really good port of a game that had come out on many other platforms, but the CD-rom version gave you this. incredibly upgraded version of Uzo Koshiro's music and that was enough right there to take this kind of simple action RPG and elevate it to the next level. And was the music on that? Was it Red Book Audio where

you could take the disc and put it into a CD a music CD player and play the tracks off of it? Yeah, I think so. It also had not full motion video. Someone on Twitter a while ago was asking, you know, why is it called full motion video? What other video is there? And I was like, the cutscenes in Lunar, the cutscenes in E's where They use the same tricks as anime to create the illusion of movement, but it was really just like a very well-done sprite work being moved around. Yeah, and that was, you know, one of the big kind of technical challenges in sort of the infancy of developing for CD-ROM was with the single speed, which I think is like 150 kilobytes per second, you couldn't stream full motion video off of the disc unless it was really encoded. And the problem was that CPUs at the time didn't have enough horsepower to be able to decode the compressed video in real time.

Right. And I'm completely ignorant on this topic, but I don't think we had the video codex we do today that sort of crunches everything down into a very easy thing to stream and play. No. And so, you know, you had some innovative, you know, developers who were kind of rolling their own. In fact, Trilobite, the company that made Seventh Guest, part of the way. that they funded that game was actually licensing out the decoder that they wrote for FMV to, I think, like, Autodesk or something. Yeah, I mean, you also had things like the video CD format. I know Sega CD had its own specific video format. There were early versions of QuickTime. There were lots of competing formats, and all of them were all kind of clunky and, you know, like thumbnail-sized, you know, postage stuff. stamps on your screen. I recall video CDs were just huge for piracy. Everything was on VCD online if you wanted it. Yeah, video CD was a big deal more in Asia, like Taiwan as opposed to the U.S.

You would occasionally get video CDs here. I bought Beatles a hard day's night on video CD, but that was, it was like really unusual to find that here. But yeah, in Asia, it was a very big, very popular format throughout the 90s. And, you know, it was a very inexpensive alternative to cassette tapes, VHS or DVD and so forth. So yeah, that was kind of a big deal. One of the interesting things about the format is that the relatively low cost of it allowed some publishers to sort of get their leg up in the market. Working Designs basically built its empire on CDs. I think they released one cartridge-based game, which was Rainbow Islands for turbographics. Was it Parasel Stars?

Or Parasel Stars, yeah, one of the two. And then after that, they switched over to CD, initially TurboC. CD. And then when that crater, they switched to Sega CD and then PlayStation, or Saturn and then PlayStation. So were the publishers with the, I'm blanking on the name of the PC engine, sorry? So when they were releasing CD versions, were they taking games that were already published on the hue cards and then adding on the high fidelity music and cutscenes and things? Or were these? In some cases, some games were specifically designed for, for PC engine CD, like Dracula X was never on a hue card. It was always a CD-based game.

And, yeah, a lot of these, like, there was a PC engine port of the manhole by, you know, by Sion. A lot of RPGs came out on the CD format and were exclusive to that format because, you know, RPGs were always really constrained by data limitations. You know, you look at Super NESRPGs, and you're like, oh, what could have been if they hadn't been trimmed down? But they just had to fit into that format, the cartridge format. But on PC Engine, they could just sprawl. And, you know, it wasn't like, it wasn't using the full 650 megabytes of a CD-ROM, but it was using more than, you know, the four megabytes of a cartridge. It was giving you enough of a unique experience. Yeah, so you got stuff like Cosmic Fantasy 1 and 2, Master of Monsters, Exile, Exile,

one and two. You even got ports of LucasArts games like Lume for PC Engine. So, yeah, there were capabilities like kinds of games that you just couldn't have

the same experience on a console without the, you know, access to the CD-ROM. So there was a different character, I think, a different vibe to the games

that you saw on PC Engine, PC Engine duo. And maybe that's why, you know, it succeeded where Sega CD failed. Yeah, also you have on here Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and there are several of these games

and I have to say it here because this will never come up on Retronauts this game series but recently I found out via Twitter that the second Croatty robot and current Riftrax guy Bill Corbett

has a bit part in one of these Sherlock Holmes consulting detective game so if you really want to find him he's in one of them That's awesome I'm just throwing that out there The PC engine CD-ROM

was also really big for anime games which makes sense You compress full-motion anime into the game. Like, of course. Yes, obviously. So it's just like a breeding ground for anime. And you kind of get into some sort of gray market smutty stuff. But there's lots of series that you'll recognize.

Like if you followed anime in the 80s and in early 90s, like Cobra or Space Adventure Cobra, Uruza Yatsura, I didn't even put all of them down because Rahnma one a half. Was the Rockman game for this? PC Engine? No, that was sick of Saturn. Oh, really? Okay. But yeah, just like tons of anime-based games. It was a very Japanese system, but in a good way. It was like all the stuff that, you know, if you were a kid who was like, oh, Japan seems so cool in like 1993, PC Engine was

why, the CD-ROM format. I was, but I needed more money for that. Yeah, me too. And then, you know, you did have some of the games that were just like the kind of game experiences you'd have on a cartridge, but with a badass soundtrack like Gate of Thunder, which was the sequel to Lords of Thunder, but because it was on CD, the shoot-em-up, yeah, it's, it just sounded so good. It had this like crazy but-rock soundtrack. It was awesome. So, so, yeah, that was definitely the big CD-based console for Japan up until PlayStation hit.

But Sega CD also was a pretty good, also-ran. It didn't really top the charts either here or in Japan or in Europe, but there were some good games on Sega CD that I think people tend to conflate Sega CD in 32X, which is not fair. Sega CD was good. I think we did a good job covering it at our first post one-up live panel, but there's a lot of great stuff. I mean, of course, it's fun to make fun of the Make My Music Video stuff like we did in our Celebrity Games episode, but there is a lot of quality there. And it's sad that this, you know, this format didn't live very long for Sega because they were doing some good. stuff with it. So, I mean, do you think that it just, because, you know, me as a, as a, as a, as a consumer, that's what I always think about is the, you know, Marky Mark and the funky bunch and the

sewer sharp and sewer shark and night trap and stuff like that. And did Sega CD have like a killer app that, you know, was going to be a system seller? Well, let me go through a list of some of the great games available for Sega CD here in America, not, not the import games. You had Snatcher, which was maybe not at the time of killer app but now people recognize it as

oh yeah this is a masterpiece of graphic adventure design by the guy who created Metal Gear let's see I did put Sewer Shark

and make my video ha ha ha Sonic CD Road rash Lunar 1 and 2 let's see Sylphid was an interesting one because

it was another one of those laser disk style games where you had actual bitmap generated sprites flying over top of a pre-rendered background that was streaming behind it. So it was a top-down shooter that ended up getting a sequel on PlayStation 2, weirdly enough.

That's right. Let's see. A personal favorite of mine, Keo Flying Squadron, which is a really weird, goofy, comical sort of almost parody shooter. It takes place in medieval Japan as you are a girl dressed in like a Playboy bunny outfit shooting up the armies of an evil Tanuki. It's weird, but it's really good. Did I say Sonic CD? I think I did Final Fight CD, which is the definitive console version of Final Fight.

It's the only version of Final Fight that has all three characters playable, as opposed to the Super NES ones, which gave you either Guy and Hagar or Cody and Hagar. They could have done both. I don't know why they couldn't have done both. Just like, we can't fit one more sprite in this game? Come on, guys. I mean, at the beginning of the Super Nias, it's like they couldn't. But yeah, Final Fight Guy should have just been all of them. Final Fight Guy plus two. final fight fight plus that guy so I guess you know I assumed that uh Sega CD was a failure you know and partly it's that's colored by the fact that you know I didn't know anybody who had one and I never you know I don't think I've ever played a Sega CD I didn't know anybody who had one either so it was but but it must have it must have done well enough that you know they were they they had reason to make two models of it no I think it did a reason three if you count the um the the What is it called?

The, oh, crap. Oh, yeah. The one that's all in one. Yes, CDX. It's so good. Shane Bettenhausen lent me his once. And I was like, I need this. That was portable, right?

Yeah. It was a CD. Like, you could listen to music on it. Move over switch. But then you could plug it into a computer or a TV. I mean, yeah, it was like the switch before there was a switch. It could couldn't play the games on the go. You could only play music.

You can pop out your Pearl Jam CD and put in panic. Hell yeah. Yeah. Panic are also known as Switch, I think, changed names in America to panic because there was also a game called Double Switch, which was more of like a detective adventure game. It's the Corey Haim game. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I mean, you definitely had your, um, your sort of silhouette-type games like Road, or, sorry, Mad Dog McCree and Time Gal. A corpse killer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there was all that kind of stuff on there.

But there were, there were great RPGs. There were some good action games. I think Sega CD was a strong system that was kind of eclipsed by the negativity surrounding 32X. Yeah, but I mean, I feel that Sega they backed the wrong horse in terms of

what they were putting out as their killer app because there was negativity about these full motion video games by critics. They didn't fall for it as Sega assumed they would or as developers assumed they would. And in those commercials from the Welcome to the next level era, it would be sewer shark and night trap and all the video games

because it was like, we can make videos happen on your video game, isn't that great? But we didn't see the really good Sega CD games, you know, put out front for us. It was mostly about the technology. And I think the price point was also a killer. Yeah. Do you know what the price was? It was like $300, $400,000 for a Sega CD?

Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty expensive. And that was as an add-on. Yeah. And then there was also the 32X, which launched at like 300. And speaking as, you know, a pre-teen, you know, when that came out, you know, convincing my parents to spring for a, you know, $500 CD-ROM for the PC was an easier sell because you got an encyclopedia.

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No, the talent is buying the dishes that fit together and not the dishes that I buy that don't fit in the dishwasher. Well, I could teach you how they can fit. Okay, Brian. Thank you. That's Brian Cranston on Geffen Playhouse Unscripted. Be sure to listen on Podcast One or through the Podcast One app and Apple Podcasts. Hey folks, I'm sorry to say that my dog has a beak feathers and is also a bird, but that doesn't mean I don't know a good deal on pet supplies when I see one.

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Read up and learn what you're up against when you're out on the street dodging traffic. And go to audible trial.com slash game to get started with your free 30-day trial. So we mentioned the fact that there was a CDI spec, like a standard. But there was also a CDI console multimedia device, whatever you want to call it, that Phillips released basically to support its spec. And it went about as well as a CDI format, which is to say, feel like a le duprin.

Out of the gates, it was outlandishly expensive. I believe it was $800, which is today money. Even more expensive than the 3DO. Oh, really? More expensive than the Neo Geo. I think so. Are you asking me or saying... No, I'm saying it was. Yeah, I just felt like in today dollars, it would be like a gaming PC, probably more than that, actually.

But I think they were marketing it as a, like, more like a set-top, you know, content box than just a pure dedicated gaming system, right? Yes. It has your encyclopedia on it and your Encyclopedia or your Sherlock Holmes is consulting detective. because everybody wants to look things up. And also some very bad games. Everybody wants to look things up on the encyclopedia on the TV. And play video games with a TV remote. Although the weed did prove that could happen, but it was not designed to be a game controller in any way. Right. Right. Yeah. The CDI, like I poured over the list of games for the CDI, and there's nothing good exclusive for that system.

There are some capable games that were ported from other systems like SpaceA. or Seventh Guest, or Pac Panic, which was a renaming of Pacmania, the puzzle game. But, yeah, I think we know which games it's, you know, known for. There are no famous games. There are many infamous games. Yeah, I know you wanted Daniel to talk about the Super NESCD-ROM. I don't know that we need to do that, but you could definitely talk a bit about how these infamous games came to be on the Phillips CDI.

Yeah, so I think as sort of common knowledge, you know, with all Retronauts listeners, Nintendo and Sony were working together on a CD add-on for Super Nintendo. And in the 11th hour, Nintendo pulled a switcheroo and licensed with, see with phillips and part of that license even though the the cd add-on for super nintendo never came to fruition was allowing phillips to create uh games with the nintendo licenses so that's how we saw you know these terrible uh zelda games and these terrible mario games i i've i've not playing these games i've seen you know uh let's plays of them oh yeah that's the best way to do it yeah they look terrible for as bad as they are

I think they are worthwhile because the world took so much joy in those really bad animated cutscenes. I mean, I think so many great memes have come out of them, and they're a decade old by now, but just like, those all touch my heart. Yeah. I can't wake to bomb some of the don't goys. That guy. There's nothing really, I don't know, some people will stand up for the gameplay of the three Zelda games, Link Faces of Evil, Zelda, Wond of Gamelon, and Zelda's Adventure. but I just don't see it. You could spin it as if to say, this is worthwhile or valid because, hey, it's a Zelda game starring Zelda.

Nintendo still hasn't done that or given us the female link a lot of people want. I mean, Link will exist, but she's a playable character in Hyrule Quarters or whatever. There's the Garudo Quest, but that's about it. Yeah, that's basically it. But, I mean, you could spin it that way, and that's cool. I mean, I bet you could make a great Zelda game with Zelda being the main character. But it's not a great game. No, no, no.

And I think that game sells for like $500 now. Not because it's good, but because people are like, I have to complete my Zelda collection because I have capitalistic compulsion and I'm a fool. Collectors are weird. Yeah. I mean, I don't really collect, so I can't say too much. I'm not a collector. Anyway, yeah, I just don't have much good to say about CDI.

You know, I wasn't even really aware. I feel like it was born out of spite and died out of spite. I think the only awareness that I had of CDI was, you know, like being a kid on summer break and being up really late one night and seeing an infomercial about it that was like... I believe I saw that too at some point. Yeah, like a 30 minute infomercial. And I was intrigued. I was like, wow, this has Nintendo games on it. This is crazy.

Look at that tomato. I remember watching GamePro TV, which is really great to go back and watch today. I'm not being sarcastic at all. And there was an entire segment on the CDI. Even as a young kid who would just love any video game thing, I'm like, J.D. Roth, you are not selling this to me. You got to try. You got to work a lot harder to get this, you know, this seed planted in my brain. So as a kid, I was like, it's too expensive. This will never enter my house. And also it just looks bad. Like, I don't want any of these things. There is the 3DO format, which was kind of like the CDI, but with good games. I didn't really prep anything in our notes for it because we covered 3DO extremely extensively back at, um, too many games in 2014. Yeah, thank you, Ray, for doing that.

But, you know, it was kind of the same idea. Like, the 3DO was also sort of supposed to be its own format of sorts. And it was kind of a game system, kind of a set-top box device for non-gaming applications. But it definitely came down down more on the side of video gaming. And it had rudimentary, not rudimentary, but decent basic level 3D capabilities. so it could actually host better games than the CDI. There was also, you know, the Jaguar CD, which I don't know that it really had that many good games, but it's cleaned a lot of teeth, so that's good.

God, I forgot about that. Yeah, I can't think of a Jaguar CD game, actually, offhand The Samurai Showdown, maybe. I can't remember which games. Oh, wait, not everything in the OTOCD, which is another thing. Which is, but that didn't really do anything worth. worth doing. What is a Jaguar CD game? Yeah, this did come out.

I'm just like, it did. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't bother to prep my notes for, for these because they were kind of inconsequential. Yeah. Maybe Alien versus Predator.

I can't remember. That was a cartridge or a CD game. It was weird to just be alive in 1995 and have just 20 different, you know, platforms and their add-ons. Yeah, I feel like Neo GeoCD and Jaguar CD were really just sort of obligatory. Yeah. Of course we'll make this. because everyone was doing a CD ad-ons race.

But they didn't really, they didn't offer much of a, like, they didn't make a case for their existence. Whereas Sika CD and PC Engine CD and especially, you know, 3DO, which was entirely CD-based, like I think those all justified the CD element. But Jaguar and NeoGeo, not so much. Well, and I think with any of these add-on, you know, CD peripherals, you know, you have this chicken and an egg thing where people aren't going to buy it unless there are compelling reasons and publishers aren't going to put games on it unless there's a big

install base. So a lot of these almost never had a chance. Well, you know, the CDI format actually had a lot of support at the beginning. Tripp Hawkins, who eventually went on to create the 3DO standard, really believed in it for a while. And then Phillips took so long to bring it to market that it just kind of crumbled from beneath them. I really recommend everyone check out the site Digital Antiquarian Philfred.net by Jimmy Mayer. It has some great retrospectives on the sort of formation and early days of the CD-ROM format and really gets into kind of the intrigue and the stupidity around the CDI format and how its endless delays really kind of cut it off at the knees.

Maybe the CDI could have been great, but because Philips just took so long to get it to market. It did not work out. The 3DO was kind of interesting, though, in that it had different models made by different manufacturers, my friend, the one friend I had. Yeah, the idea behind that was to be a format, to be a standard. Like, rather than, you know, we've talked about CDs as different standards, but this, the idea here was for the hardware to be a standard. And that wasn't totally out of the pale. The MSX computer had been created as a standard. There was no single company behind it. It was kind of a collaboration. And it was a spec that lots of people could work to.

Yeah. My high school would have been like that, but it just didn't work out. A high school friend of mine had the Gold Star, and I just assumed that was the crappiest version because, I mean, Gold Star, are they still around? I think they're Elgino. Okay. Well, when they were Gold Star, they were synonymous with, like, bottom shelf crap, just like, do you need a microwave to cook food, maybe for a year? Okay, there you go. A radio alarm clock. Yeah. So, you know, the console add-ons and so forth all had their ups and downs. But I really, for me, you know, when I think of CD-ROM games, I think of PC gaming, Mac gaming. And that's really kind of, I, that's really kind of, I.

think where it took root. And that's that's kind of where CD gaming, I think, really broke out and proved its value. But I think that's kind of why you're here, Daniel. You want to talk about this. So I'm going to let you take over at this point. All right. Yeah. So, you know, just kind of setting the stage, we're going back to, I don't know, 1993 thereabouts. I'm a freshman in high school and I remember going into a Comp USA or Computer City and there was a display, you know, PC there playing seventh guest. And I was just blown away. It was, I mean, it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. You know, I was a pretty big PC gamer, played a lot of PC adventure games, you know, Sierra Online and LucasArts. But this, you know, just,

was beyond anything that I had, I had ever seen. Yeah, it was going to be one of the SNES CD's killer apps. I remember Nintendo Power talking about it in great detail and talking about the video and the actors and things like that. Just like, you will not believe this. Yeah. So, you know, just I think when you're talking about PC CD-ROM, there's really, you know, two key games that I think of, and that's this one, seventh guest, and then missed, which, you know, we've already talked about a little bit. And they came out about at the same time. I think Seventh Guest came out a little earlier.

And I feel like Seventh Guest was, you know, something that sold CD-ROM drives as evidenced by the number of bundles that it was included in. So, you know, because PCs typically didn't ship with CD-ROM drives until, you know, probably like 94-95, the way you got a CD-ROM drive was to, you know, buy it, uh, typically with a sound card and then, you know, some speakers and some CD-ROM titles bundled in. So I ended up, uh, getting one that had seventh guest and I think Compton's encyclopedia and battle chess. Oh, boy. And this, this was, you know, this was ridiculously expensive for, for the time. Was it over a thousand? I want to say it was like, I think it was like $700. Okay. Yeah. That sounds about right. Yeah. Um, And I was obsessive.

So after I saw Seventh Guest, I had my heart set on, I have to get, you know, a CD-ROM drive for my computer. I had a 386, you know, PC in my room. And I would get home from school and get the newspaper and get the, you know, Babbage's ad. And I would scour that thing looking for, you know, the bundles that were available. I would call the store. I mean, they must have gotten so sick of me. I was one of those people, too. Don't worry.

Yeah. I mean, just, you know, relentlessly, you know, obnoxious, you know, 13-year-old. And finally, you know, I saved enough money and I got this, you know, big, huge box bundle with, you know, the drive in it. And it was a double-speed CD-ROM drive. And it was a caddy-based drive. So it had, you know, like a, almost like a clamshell kind of caddy that you would insert into the drive. I assume that the reason for that was because it was a double. speed that it had to do with the stability of, you know, rather than like a tray loading.

I was, oh, sorry, go. I was just going to say, so I get the CD-ROM drive. I, you know, get it installed on my computer. And, you know, this is a hassle in and of itself, like opening up the case and connecting all these cables and things. And I go to play seventh guest for the very first time after obsessing over this, you know, moment for months, and it won't run. Oh, God.

I needed a 486, and I only had a 3.86. That hurts. That really hurts. I mean, I was like you, and my heart ached for the CD-ROM games I couldn't play, and I was happy with Super Nintendo and things like that, but walking into software, et cetera, and seeing there's a Maniac Mansion sequel that I can't play just hurt me, like, physically made me, like, wins, just like, oh, but it's right there. But we wouldn't get a family computer until 96, so we didn't.

even have the pre-CD-ROM computer, but like you, I sort of went back to everything I missed or all these things I really wanted until before I had that CD-ROM power. Yeah, so Seventh-Cast, I guess, just sort of, you know, giving a little background on what it is. It's, uh, it does not hold up particularly well today. Aren't the video just very small, like a very small element of the game? Yeah, so the game, you're exploring a haunted mansion from a first person perspective. and you kind of have set waypoints. And when you're walking from one spot to another,

there's like a transition video that'll play. And, you know, it kind of created the illusion that, you know, you had this sort of full exploration in 3D. Yeah, Mist did the same thing. Actually, yeah, D does that as well. Mist and Seventh Guest are actually really similar games. Just, you know, kind of different settings. and, you know, MIST is more of the slideshow, whereas Seventh Guest has, you know, the video transitions.

And then they're both, you know, at their heart puzzle-based games where you're, you know, just sort of like going to different areas, solving puzzles within those areas, and then, you know, progressing a story. But you can't die. I think maybe you can die at the end of MIST if you do something with the page. You can't get, you can't die, but you can become trapped forever in a book. Right. So, you know, you can't die in either game. You know, there aren't, like, characters that you interact with. So in terms of, like, actual, you know, gaming, they were pretty different experiences from, you know, what you had at the time.

That's interesting. I was just thinking about how the advent up this new technology changed game design. And in the case of the games I love the most on PC, LucasArts games, I feel like they could have been all on floppies up to me. Grim Fandango, full throttle was the first CD-ROM-only game, but that was because just of practicality, it would take too many discats, but it didn't change the actual what you were doing in the game. They just could squeeze in more animations and stuff, but later down the line, this is not a CD game, but I mean, RPG developers, especially, like J-R-PG developers, would abuse

the format almost, where I'm playing Dragon Quest 7 now, maybe I'll finish it by the time this podcast comes out, probably not, but I feel like that game's development is like, like, so tied into that developer having CDs for the first time. Just like, every idea is good. Bring them all. Stits them all together. And it results in a game that kind of needs an editor, but I can see just being so in love with having 700 or whatever megabytes of space.

Juan, I think that was two discs. That was, 1500 megabytes. I forgot it was two discs. It wasn't just a two-disc case with one disc in it? I'm pretty sure there were two discs. Okay, yeah. I just, I feel like I can just see the love in UG.G. They sure didn't use that on the, uh,

quality CG. No, no. That CG was from 95 and the game came out in 2000. So, yeah. And I think, you know, seventh guest and missed were special and were killer apps for CD-ROM because I think they were

designed for CD-ROM. Right. They would not have been experiences possible on floppy disks. And I, you know, I would argue that a lot of the games that were on floppy and then had CD versions, the CD versions, the CD versions were worse. You know, you ended up getting like a really terrible, you know,

uh, voice acting, for example. So like I, I, I, I loved Sierra games and, you know, Kings Quest 6 is made much worse by, you know, the voice actor. Yeah, they're, they're, they're keeping it all in house spirit is cute and charming until you hear the voice acting, which is basically the developers, uh, putting on like falsetto voices and doing their own work. And again, I keep bringing up Lucas arts, but they got professional actors. Like, they knew, like, we need to find people who do this, not just get in a closet with our, with our secretary and record some audio. And then, you know, some other similarities, you know, parallels between seventh guest and

missed. They were both made by, you know, smaller teams in Pacific Northwest. So, uh, missed was cyan. It was two brothers, Robin and Rand Miller. Um, it really, you know, just kind of seemed like a kind of garage band, uh, type of production, you know, a lot of, I think they had. a few other people working with them

but yeah it was a small team for sure yeah definitely you know had that that kind of independent you know studio vibe to it and then seventh guest was developed by trilobite

which was an independent developer spun out of Virgin Interactive and they both games became wildly successful you know

beyond anybody's expectation So, Seventh Guests sold, I think, 2 million copies, and MIST actually became the best-selling PC game until it was... Until the Sims, right? Right, until the Sims, and it sold 8 million copies, which, you know, were just staggering. I bought one of them. I'm sure there are more out there, but I think Miss is the only game, at least I can think of, that has a parody game made by someone else. Pissed with John Goodman, please look that up.

I'm sorry I missed that in the Celebrity Games episode, but God, it's just an amazing work that that even exist. Are there any games that are direct parodies of other games that seems like that's just too expensive to do now? Yeah, nothing comes to mind unless it's, you know, a developer poking fun of their own work. Yeah. Like Juan Pacu Graffiti Sputterhouse

or Parodias or something, but I can't think of anyone making games to mock another game. I'm thinking of another one is who wants to beat up a millionaire, but that's not making fun of a game. It's making fun of a game show, so different thing. But yeah, that's just the one

That's how popular Miss was, just like everyone knew about it. And I'm sure some people didn't like it or wanted to make fun of its kind of artsy ways. So, yeah. So then I think, you know, the other kind of unfortunate parallel between, you know, these two games is that, you know, they kind of had troubled follow-ups. So with Trilobite, it was a case of, you know, they were a small, you know, kind of bootstrap team. And then when the game was so successful, you know, suddenly there was, let's, let's grow the team, you know, tenfold and pump out, you know, six more games. And they just kind of crumbled under the expectations and, and the, you know, the pressure of that. And then the follow up to missed, Riven, I think, you know, it was probably a better game than 11th hour, the sequel to seventh guest.

really delayed and just didn't, you know, didn't capture the same, you know, lightning in a bottle that missed. Yeah, I mean, they, they got really carried away with the idea. They were like, well, we did one CD, but what if we did five? Was it four or five? I think it was five. Yeah, a friend of mine had that game and it came with just like a folder. Yeah, and that came out on PlayStation and it has like this crazy thick case. Yeah, it's, I played some of that and it really just didn't quite strike me the way Mist did. they started giving you more interaction with other humans, whereas that was extremely limited in MIST. Here, there's much more of it, and it's really hard to shake off the realization that you're just like watching. You know, it's kind of like in Bioshock where everyone interacts with you from behind a glass wall or something. And after a while, you're like, everyone's behind a glass wall. I'm not actually interacting with anyone. They're talking at me. Well, they are afraid of you.

Your only verb is kill. Like kill and eat are your only verbs. That's true. And drink. Yeah. have you pretty much said your say about a seventh guest? Yeah, I think, you know, it was definitely a, you know, system seller for me. It's not a game that I went back to a lot once I, you know, once I finished it.

But, you know, it was definitely visually and I think another part was the sound. So, you know, as I kind of mentioned before, CD was a gateway to, I think, for a lot of gamers to, you know, experiencing, you know, really high fidelity. sound in in games before. So it was the first time that I had, you know, a sound card that was capable. Because, you know, before, if all you had was a PC speaker, I mean, it sounded terrible. You know, sound was not an element of gaming at all. You know, usually you would just turn the sound off. Yeah, it was like playing music on one of the first cell phones almost. That's what it sounded like. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, by the time I got into CD-ROM, you know, bought a CD-ROM, the format was pretty well established and had begun to become popularized. So basically,

from that point on, I don't think I bought any more games that came out on CD or on discette. I think it was just everything was on CD. And after a while, it stopped being like, oh, I'm buying a CD-ROM game. And it was just more like, this is just the format computer games come on. But, you know, one of the things that was great about CD-ROM was just how much space there was. And I don't mean in terms of, you know, allowing you to have a lot of game content or a lot of multimedia extras within the game. On computers, you didn't have the limitations of consoles in that you could access a CD-ROM as a directory, as, you know, as a, as a, as a device. So you could look through and browse what was on the CD-ROM, and a lot of developers would put

stuff on there, just like extra stuff. Sometimes it was, you know, just like manuals or some artwork or something. All the sound effects might be on there as waves that you could, you know, play around with. But, I mean, sometimes there would be extra content and you could find interesting things. And they were put there as just like a bonus. And it wasn't part of the game itself, but it was like an extra that came with the game. And it was really nice because it was something you, like, I certainly didn't see that on consoles. And, yeah, having just like these little extra, you know, demos or things like that was really cool.

and the sort of flip side of that is that a couple of years later magazines started distributing CD-ROMs with cover discs and you know I would buy like two or three Mac-based magazines a month and get all kinds of demos

and games and applications and there would be like crazy stuff you know there'd be shareware games and I would find like I discovered spider web software games through that format but then there would be other like weird cool curios I remember there was one, I want to say Mac Addict magazine.

Maybe it was Mac Home, Mac World, I don't know. But one of the cover discs they released had early versions of the game Marathon. It was like an alpha, like pre-Alpha version of Marathon. Interesting. That was built on this like super limited engine. It was before it became a non-orthagonal engine. It was more like Wolfenstein. It was like built off of their previous game pathways into darkness.

And it was super ugly. and clumsy, and it was like this amazing archaeological relic where all of a sudden I was like, wow, this is, you know, this is before this game that I love. Like, here's kind of like what they did to begin with. And, you know, just having that, having access to that was really great. The framing device for the PC gamer demo discs in the mid to late 90s, which I loved, that was so steeped in PC gaming at the time. And they were just these little treasure troves of demos. but the framing device was an adventure game almost. Like you go into this elevator and you coconut monkey greets you,

and there's like in jokes about mystery science theater. I mean, you could just click on the folders and open the demos, but it was sort of fun to explore it in the more cumbersome but more entertaining way. And you're talking about hidden things on disc, and you made me immediately remember one of the more infamous cases, and that was sneaking one of the two independent South Park shorts into a Tiger Woods PlayStation game. The PlayStation itself could not play it,

but if you put it into a PC, it was just a video file. You could watch that Spirit of Christmas South Park short that was made as a video card for the Fox president at the time. That's how they got their series. So they got in trouble for that. And I think the game was recalled even. Yeah, because that was not their material to distribute. Yeah. So it really was a new era of video gaming.

And I think it took a long time for CD-ROM to come together. But once it did, it really defined gaming and computing for a decade. And, you know, now we've moved. the digital distribution era where we just get on the internet and I don't remember the last time I bought software and a package for my computer. That's just a weird thought. I don't buy that many packaged retail games anymore either. I'm perfectly happy to download them, you know, buy them virtually. But for a while, like CD-ROMs were the standard. And it was a kind of a crucial evolution point in video gaming. A stepping stone. I mean, I think CD-ROMs were the standard. I mean, I think CD-ROMs

's legacy ultimately is that it did a lot to kind of push technology forward. You know, they all of a sudden, you know, developers had all this additional space, but there were all the technical limitations to using it initially. And then when the hardware, you know, gradually caught up with all that space, then, you know, it sort of led us to where we are today. So any final thoughts before we wrap this up? I, you know, for me, the biggest what if is what if, you know, Nintendo had had that CD-ROM drive. What kind of games would they have made?

I think of that, too, and thinking of all the games they had to change because that drive didn't come out. I wonder what they would look like if that drive had existed. The two I can think of offhand are Marvelous and Secret of Mana, which were both intended for the CD. And Marvelous was delayed like four years because the CD didn't exist to make it with. But Secret of Mata, apparently, they're able to fix things quicker. Yeah, I mean, they didn't have, Square didn't have Nintendo's ability to absorb costs. Right. Have extremely extended development time, so they just hack stuff out.

Some Nintendo interview on Glitterberry or Schmupplations about Marvelous or maybe about some other AGONuma project. They have stills from the anime scenes that were going to be in Marvelous. Yeah, yeah. Huh. I didn't know about that. Yep, I forget. I wish, I'll try to find this before. episode post. But if you search Marvelous and other Treasure Island interview or using its

Japanese name, I'm sure it will come up. I'm sure there's one interview on the internet about that game. So yeah, I guess that wraps it up for this episode. And I would like to say thank you to Daniel for supporting our Kickstarter way back when and for finally coming in. And I'm glad we got to make this episode happen. I hope you've had a good time. Yeah, it's been great. I appreciate you guys having me. And I just want to make one plug. Oh, sure. This is plug time, I think. Yeah. Yep. So I would like to publicly encourage Jetpack Goonies. Maybe that can be a Retronauts project. That would be interesting. Yeah. I'll see what I can do. You have to learn Unity now, Jeremy.

I don't want to. You have to. All right. Maybe that can be a Kickstarter. Pay me tens of thousands of dollars and I'll learn Unity. So yeah, for Retronauts, this has been Jeremy Parrish and Bob Mackey and Daniel Hawks. And we are Retronauts at Retronauts.com. You can find us on iTunes on the Podcast One network and so on and so forth. I'm on Twitter as GameSpite, of course. Yeah, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Serbo, of course, and I write for fandom.com.

My video game and anime coverage and something awful.com for my comedy articles and my other podcast is Talking Simpsons. Every Wednesday on the Lasertime podcast network, just search for Talking Simpsons in your podcast machine. or iTunes or whatever, you will find it. We go step by step through the entire show. We'll probably be in season six by the time this launches or maybe the end of season five. But if you like The Simpsons, just find an episode you like and listen to our corresponding episode.

You'll get a feel for what we're trying to do, and I think you'll like it. And Daniel, how about you? There's really nowhere to find me online. I guess you could search me on LinkedIn. What's about it? Okay. Well, that's nice and easy. That's weird.

You don't crave attention in an unhealthy way like all of us? Weird. I'm just a regular guy. I don't think that's regular. actually. I think that's pretty weird. Okay. So anyway, thanks again for coming in. And that's it for this episode. Goodbye. We'll be back in a week. The all-new Toyota RAV-4 asks, what if? What if your ride was refined and rugged at the same time?

Introducing a car that's got style and substance to spare. The all-new RAV-4 Limited, featuring a sophisticated muscular new exterior, and available options like a premium JBL audio system and panoramic roof. The all-new RAV-FORD Limited. Toyota, let's go places. JBL and Clarifier registered trademarks of Harmon International Industries Incorporated. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town.

I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect. the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been

charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.