Gregory's ServerNew blog post! I'm always seeing "first CD-ROM game" citations that are totally inconsistent, or which cite games like Myst, so I decided to put together a timeline of all the candidates - and ended up calling into question the point of "firsts" lists in the first place.
 40 comments
@misty Codemasters also released CD based games for the Spectrum and C64 (and made but didn’t release for the Amstrad) back in 1989. https://spectrumforeveryone.com/features/inside-codemasters-cd-games-pack/ @misty the very first thing a historian discovers is the pointlessness of proclaiming something as "the very first thing". ... Wait.  @misty oh I had no idea there was a CD-ROM version of The Manhole. Neither did I know that Haruhiko Shono's Alice was so significant in terms of chronology (mostly because I never fully paid attention to its release year)   @misty yeah the close you look at anything like this the more you realise categories have blurry edges!  Dang, anyone who says that #Myst was the first CDROM game doesn't even know #Cyan's history. Edit: embarrasing typo. #SmartphonesAreDUMB @misty … my personal first CDROM game was, “Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel” … also Cyan. The soundtrack absolutely slaps for a videogame of that era, because “CD-ROM technology” … it’s just a real band? 🥰 🤣 I didn’t know “The Manhole” got a CD, I think I only saw that one in Floppy edition. @misty I enjoyed this. Calling No-Ri-Ko the first CD-ROM adventure made me think about it in a different way, hadn’t realized there was that aspect to it. @misty Nice post! And I definitely agree with your sentiments about crowning 'firsts' - especially since my first (... sorry) thought when I got to the Beethoven entry was that things like the Grolier Encyclopedia (1985/6) and Microsoft Bookshelf (1987) would be strong contenders for that title too, except were presumably well outside a consumer's reach at that point. (Edit: I was thinking of the wrong Grolier disc apparently, it seems the KnowledgeDisc was a laserdisc. Cool but irrelevant!) @baljemmett Haha, yeah! You can tell I had a very consumer focus here; Microsoft Bookshelf's a real oddity. Not sure consumer-grade CD-ROM drives were even around yet in 1987? @misty And how many trivia geeks took one look at this screenshot and went, "Um, that's incorrect..." (Was only 10 years; Beethoven's 8th, while written in 1812, wasn't released until 1814.) That's some lovely Floyd-Steinburg. The whole time I was "stuck" in monochrome-land (1989-1994), I was dying for some color in my world. Now that I've had all the 24bpp I can stand for the past 29 years, I really, *really* miss monochrome. ^___^ @RL_Dane definitely Atkinson. Recognizable pattern; esp. in left cheek. They probably used the software that came with the Apple scanner, it used Atkinson dithering. Ok cool. I really wish Atkinson got more credit for his genius. He pushed the hardware at least five years ahead of its time. I remember seeing 386es around 1993 with much slower graphics than what the Lisa had with such a hobbled 68k in 1983. :D I'm not an Apple fan anymore, but I get pretty ticked when people say that they just ripped off the Xerox PARC. They took a pretty rough idea and made it work well enough on very limited hardware.  @misty @jdyer Yeah, like… a younger friend was telling me the other day that Metroid was in Fall Out Boy’s “We didn’t Start the Fire” remix because that game had the first ever female PC, and I’m like… I’m not sure whose life it would improve if I gave them a different, also-incorrect answer, so I didn’t   @Cdespinosa Hmm, that raises an interesting question. Was the program itself actually on the CD? Or was it floppies bundled with a music-only CD? @Cdespinosa OK no, it looks like it was in fact on the CD. https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/voyager-cdrom-classical-music-tour-1868837003 @misty I don't think Street Fighter on CD-ROM is quite as weird as it seems. Arcade games would routinely be extremely large by home console stds, since they weren't being mass-produced on the same scale. Buying those ROMs at the home release scale would have been prohibitively expensive. Street Fighter in arcades was over 4 MB of ROMs. In 1988, it was inconceivable to do a home release of that size; only a handful of late SNES games in the mid-'90s were that big, after prices had come down.  @misty that's such a cool post. Would you also consider LaserDisc games? Or are you a CD purist? |
@misty good post, Misty