Multimedi-huh?: The CD-ROM Revolution
By Jake Spencer
“Mom keeps sending me clippings about the information superhighway and interactive multimedia... You hear so much about it, but really, what is it...slide shows with music? Suddenly it’s all over the place. EVERYWHERE.”
“How could it fail to make art?”
This is a story about business, technology, and art.
Seattle, Washington.
1986.
None other than Bill Gates has gathered titans of industry from across the globe for Microsoft's First International Conference on CD ROM. Floppy disks? Who needs 'em! The future is here. And the showstopping killer app for this new technology...
Is Dun & Bradstreet's Million Dollar Directory, a sort of corporate phone book. The print edition filled thousands of pages, but now, thanks to the power of compact disc, all the business world’s contact information can be digitally stamped on a tea saucer-sized piece of plastic and flung clear across the room with one hand!
Needless to say, the crowd loved it.
And as far as Bill knew, that was it. That was the show. Goodnight, everyone; we'll see you next year!
Titanic: Adventure Out of Time by Cyberflix
That's when Stan Cornyn took the stage to unveil a project his company, The Record Group, had secretly been developing alongside heavy hitters like Philips, Sony, and Matsushita. It was a third standard, separate from audio CDs and productivity-focused CD-ROM. Cornyn called it CD-I: Compact Disc Interactive.
In that moment, humanity entered its next stage. This was the dawning of the Age of Multimedia.
The Record Group demonstrated three projects:
The Time Machine, an edutainment toy that allowed users to view maps from any point in time, watching history unfold at a rate of one year per second, with audio commentary. They could even stop to click on video clips and read articles along the way.
An untitled “James Bond-like” adventure with “elements of literature.” Explore the streets of London in different time periods.
Princess Di Is Related to Chiang Kai-shek [Working Title]. A database of rulers, including genealogical and historical information, which would be incorporated into a maze game.
In total, Cornyn said his team had about 20 CD-I titles in the works, although “probably 10 will fall off the truck.” In hindsight, his estimate was optimistic, as none of the projects shown at the conference were completed, and the CD-I standard never gained much traction. Nevertheless, the stage was set for multimedia entertainment on digital, optical discs.
So what was the first CD-based game that did make it to market?
On December 4, 1988, NEC released the CD-ROM²* attachment for their PC Engine** game console, alongside two disc-based games.
*Pronounced “CD ROM ROM”
**Released internationally as TurboGrafx-16 and TurboGrafx-CD
Fighting Street was a home conversion of Capcom's arcade hit, Street Fighter, and next to its cousins on various PCs of the time, it looked downright perfect.
But that had nothing to do with the additional storage capacity of CD-ROM. The base model PC Engine was simply better suited to these kinds of visuals than contemporary home computers. So what, then, did this version offer that couldn’t be found elsewhere? CD-quality audio. Not even a dedicated arcade cabinet could come close to producing sounds like this.
Not to be outdone, CD-ROM²’s other initial offering, No∙Ri∙Ko, had full-blown music videos.
Sort of.
She sings! She plays rock-paper-scissors! She keeps on singing!
She's... She's still singing.
Meanwhile, personal computers wouldn't see their first commercially released CD-ROM game until March of 1989, when Activision published an enhanced version of The Manhole, which, like Fighting Street, added new audio to an existing game.
It's safe to say these early examples fell short of delivering the multimedia revolution Stan Cornyn promised, and that's hardly a surprise. If you were a game developer, how could you even begin to wrap your head around the possibilities of moving from, say, a 3.5” floppy disk or a game cartridge to a CD-ROM?
How could you ever generate enough assets to fill that space when a single CD was likely to have exponentially more capacity than your computer's entire hard drive? And even with all that new storage space, computers and game consoles of the '80s were still...of the '80s. A disc could hold more data, but the machine's raw power was unchanged.
In 1986, a 10-megabyte hard drive could add about $900 to the price of a typical desktop computer. Manufacturing a CD cost a few cents.
Remember Stan Cornyn's announcement of 20 projects in development? Well, he went on to say that in the next year, The Record Group could comfortably handle “up to about 50 programs where we're involved in the creative design part of it. More if we're just crunching someone else's data.”
And the cost of all this production? “At most, $250,000 per title — using graduate student labor.”
By 1995, the average multimedia CD-ROM cost $100,000-$200,000 to develop...as long as it didn't contain anything except still images and text. You want animation? You're looking at $500,000. And video? A million bucks, minimum, with budgets often doubling or tripling that.
From day one, multimedia was built on big dreams and untenable promises, and everybody wanted to be a part of the action. As John Dvorak put it, “The fact is that CD-ROM is a low-tech aspect of a high-tech industry, and thus can be easily understood by venture capitalists.”
While plenty were skeptical about investing in an unproven market, nobody wanted to outright bet against visionaries like Trip Hawkins or his new company, 3DO. His pitch was that every modern entertainment system can handle stereo and video. The next step would be a 3DO Interactive Multiplayer atop every television set, to play multiple things interactively...eo.
The 3DO Company went public in March 1993 with a valuation of about $300 million – not too shabby for a tech and entertainment company that still didn't have a single product to show.
Night Trap was developed for Control-Vision, a VHS-based game console that never saw the light of day. It was resurrected a few years later for release on Sega CD and quickly became the face of interactive movies, for better or worse.
But while it was relatively easy to convince the money people that “a movie you can control” would appeal to the kids, the creative people really didn't know what to do with that. Rob Fulop, a key figure behind pioneering interactive movies like Night Trap and Sewer Shark, said:
“Nobody on the team had any idea what an interactive movie looked like, how it should work, let alone how to go about making one.”
Production meetings routinely turned into anarchic screaming matches.
“One time the person who brought and cared for plants was there. Often these newcomers would have the loudest voice at the meeting. They viewed it as their chance to move up and be noticed...”
Incredibly, though, while CD-i, 3DO and so many other chest-thumping multimedia blowhards became money-losing laughing-stocks, the CD-ROM business was booming. While only 6% of US households had a multimedia-capable PC in 1994 – and only a third of those were powerful enough to run most new releases - CD-ROM software was bringing in about $360 million dollars annually.
1993 saw the release of about 3,000 new CD-ROM products.
In 1994, there were roughly 8,000.
It became a medium of not just larger file sizes, but more kinds of content. Software was reaching new audiences; audiences that didn't want the same old games with better music. Research showed that the strongest selling point for multimedia PCs was the promise of a complementary encyclopedia on CD-ROM. A customer who plonks down a thousand dollars on a computer so they can get a “free” copy of Encarta might sound like every salesperson's dream...but what do you sell them after that?
Madeline’s European Adventure by Creative Wonders
Like Million Dollar Directory and encyclopedias, it turned out children's books were a great way to show off new technology. The idea of interactive books-on-computer preceded CD-ROMs, of course, but now they finally had room to breathe, with page after page of high-quality artwork, full narration, and slapstick animation everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Familiar names and the promise of scholastic enrichment reeled in parents, and the dadaist audio/visual gags could keep kids engaged for hours.
This was a distinctly new product, and it sold gangbusters, appealing to people who might otherwise be intimidated by video games and computers.
People like writer, illustrator, and photographer Monica Gesue, who saw an opportunity to share the experience of being a kid in suburban Ohio.
Chop Suey by Magnet Interactive
Chop Suey had no pretense of being game-like or educational, and its story had no regard for narrative structure. This was a mood piece; a dreamy escape for artsy misfits who could see all the beautiful comedy residing in the mundane.
Co-creator Theresa Duncan said: “Our goal was not to be the most technically advanced but to make it look almost like folk art, to bring the human being back into it, so that it looked handmade and you could see where Monica had drawn inside or outside the lines.”
Gesue and Duncan named Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Little Nemo In Slumberland, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, and artist Rodney Alan Greenblat among their many inspirations.
Technology was finally progressing to the point where things on a computer screen didn't have to look like they were generated by a computer. Developers could just scan a drawing or snap a digital photo, and poof! There it was on the screen.
And they loved this. They loved it. You know why they made things look like this?
Pantsylvania by Headbone Interactive
Because they could. Because digital cameras and flatbed scanners and photo manipulation software existed, and because they were affordable, and because they were easy enough to pick up and use. Because the technology was there, and the venture capitalists didn't know a thing about what separates the good software from the bad, and because the people who cared for the plants could bust into a meeting and shout their ideas, and you know what? Some of those ideas were good. Or just weird enough to stand out on a shelf among the boring, respectable reference works for grown-ups and pandering pablum for toddlers. And the twenty-something computer nerds and art school burnouts making baby games could entertain themselves by doodling in the margins.
Yes, CD-ROM (aided by the maturing Internet) was valuable to the stuffy businesses who needed an efficient database of contact information for all the other stuffy businesses, and yes, traditional games did benefit from having room for more graphics and more music, but video game history has a bad habit of overlooking the importance of this era’s wild experimentation. Multimedia wasn’t just a speed bump on the road from games that fit into a few megabytes to games that fill gigabytes.
Fighting Street’s same-game/better-music attitude did ultimately prove to be the right approach for many action-oriented series, but what about The Manhole? Well, it was followed up by Myst, which replaced its predecessor’s 1-bit black-and-white drawings with state-of-the-art polygonal environments. It was the best selling computer game of the ‘90s, setting the standard for what an immersive, computer-rendered world could be.
The Manhole (1988), Myst (1993), and Obduction (2016). All developed by Cyan/Cyan Worlds. (Images from MobyGames)
And No∙Ri∙Ko?
Well, wouldn't you know that beyond the singing, it actually did show what was possible for visual novels and dating sims when they weren't constrained to a handful of megabytes.
Interactive movies? The hardware of the '80s and '90s might not have been ready for them, but there's a modern resurgence, and it shows no sign of stopping.
Clockwise from top left: AfterHours, Contradiction: Spot the Liar!, Telling Lies, Press X to Not Die
As for interactive multimedia's most unique contributions—the surreal, directionless wonderlands—well, maybe that moment has passed. The artists behind the multimedia aesthetic weren't trying to work within an aesthetic at all; they were reveling in their ability to break the limitations of the previous computer generation, oblivious to how low-tech it would all look just a few years later. Novel, toy-like tools were put in the hands of outsiders with enough financial backing to take chances.
Business and technology came together to promise the world an unimaginable new artform. That part isn't so strange. What is strange is that, in a sense, they delivered.
