@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 Well this is gold.

@misty Honourable mention: Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond Mackerel.

@misty yeah the close you look at anything like this the more you realise categories have blurry edges!

@misty

Dang, anyone who says that #Myst was the first CDROM game doesn't even know #Cyan's history.

#TheManhole

@48kRAM

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!)

@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.)

@misty

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. ^___^

@misty Fighting Street 😊

@misty Great write-up as always! The Manhole looks charming as heck, makes me wanna make something like that for the upcoming Decker jam 🤔 Also lol Fighting Street 😅

@misty nice, short, and informative. thank you

@misty omg

@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

@misty this was a fascinating read!

@misty wow, I think I’ve seen this “game” from the screenshot, can’t remember where though. It was a bit, boring?

@misty I have this on floppy disc

@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?