If you ended up here, I recommend reading parts 1 (https://wololo.net/2015/10/12/just-2-cents-illusory-specs-wars-part-1/) and 2 (https://wololo.net/2015/10/19/just-2-cents-illusory-specs-wars-part-2/).

Mid 90s – The Multimedia Wars

So, as the Bit Wars was raged on, other competitors tried to take advantage of Sega’s marketing, such as Atari Jaguar with its ‘Do the math’ ad campaign.

But while Atari was hoping on the bitness hype train, Sega was already on with their newer fad, which was multimedia capabilities with their Genesis add-on, the Sega CD, which I already talked a bit about it here (https://wololo.net/2015/03/19/just-my-2-cents-the-vr-hype-train/).

Not only Sega, but their arch rival Nintendo was also working on their own CD-ROM add-on prototype, the SNES Playstation, which was a deal between Sony and Nintendo that eventually fell apart and later came to be the Sony Playstation we all love. Soon, once again, Atari would follow behind with their Jaguar CD add-on. Meanwhile, new players tried to enter the market, namely the 3DO and the Philips CD-i.

So, what was all the fuss all about? Why making use of CD-ROM was deemed such a big deal? Well, for starters, CD-ROMs were much cheaper to manufacture than cartridges while holding dozens of times the amount of data, at the cost of longer reading times and less durability.

Just to put things in perspective, the largest SNES cartridge released (Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean) contained 6 MB of data, while the average CD-ROM can hold over 600 MB of data while being actually cheaper than cartridges.
While these ‘big’ cartridges made possible some amazing achievements (like a vocal opening theme on SNES Phantasia game), it was nothing comparable to what CD-ROMs were capable.

So, naturally, it opened many possibilities, since storage had long been a bottleneck in game development at that time. They could finally fit all orchestral music, cutscenes, larger sprites and more frames of animation, basically everything gamers and developers had always dreamed. But if that’s so, how come all these consoles tanked?

The main issue with these early consoles was that instead of taking advantage of the extra space the CD-ROMs had to offer to accommodate good game design, they chose once again to force a shallow hardware gimmick to promote games and systems. They promoted a vague term they called “multimedia”, which could describe a wide range of novelties, like pre-rendered videos, better sound quality, orchestral music and so on. Sadly, in video games it mostly meant FMV (Full Motion Videos) back then.

The Sega CD overused FMVs to a sad (and comic) extent. Although eventually they did use CD-ROMs the right way (like in Sonic CD and Lunar), many games were basically bad taste cheesy FMV segments with little to no interactivity. One of the most notorious examples being Night Trap, which brewed much controversy due its (bad taste) mature content, cheesy acting and low production value.

Also, the 3DO and the others had its share of bad FMV “games”, like Plumber Don’t Wear Ties, which would be more qualified as a soft-core movie than as a game.

Why none of this multimedia fad actually mattered?

The low quality and interactivity of this FMV games were not the only problem these early CD-ROM consoles faced. The biggest issue was that developers seemed to miss what made video games awesome in the first place. One notable example being the Philips CD-i.

After Nintendo and Sony deal to make the Playstation fell apart, Nintendo made a new deal with Philips, allowing them to produce games for their new CD-ROM system using beloved Nintendo IPs, such as Mario and Zelda. Probably they thought that if they got beloved Nintendo characters, put some FMVs and maybe some digitized sprites, they couldn’t miss. Boy, if they only knew…

The problem was that they forgot everything that made Mario and Zelda awesome in the first place, which was their game design; just so that they could shove crappy FMVs and “improved” digitized graphics in the games. These games barely had any resemblance with their respective franchises, so the aftermath was games that were universally critically panned and ignored by gamers and even by Nintendo themselves.

Eventually, all these consoles got some good games, but they were mostly games that didn’t rely so heavily on multimedia, such as Rayman and arcade ports like Super Street Fighter II Turbo. But by then the market were already over saturated and the their brand credibility was low.

What did matter?

That is not to say that CD-ROMs didn’t had a huge impact on the industry. Of course it did, but not in the way it was being promoted at the time. Vastly superior storage space and ‘multimedia’ capabilities alone are not what make a console successful. Good games do. So, even with sometimes they had 1% the storage space available, the cartridge games were still on top.

Eventually there were consoles that used it the right way like the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation, but without resorting to this multimedia fad alone. And proper use of CD-ROM technology is what I think that made the biggest turnaround in the industry, which have consequences even to this day. But more about that on the next part in the Polygon Wars, so stay tuned. And what about you? Did you get hooked by the multimedia back then? Share your thoughts!