61 Frames Per Second

We’re taking a break from our regular 10 Years Ago column this week, but only because nothing happened ten years ago this week—unless you are some kind of terrible extreme sports game aficionado, in which case you can talk about EA’s Rush Down by yourself. Fortunately for the rest of us, something great did happen this week. It’s just something we have to go back a little bit further to discuss.

The Compact Disc (released, sort of, on March 8th, 1979) was first publicly demoed thirty years ago this previous Sunday. It went on to become one of the major driving technologies of the digital media revolution. It also broadened the horizons of videogames as a medium, and to an extent democratized the industry as well.

The Compact Disc format originally began as an audio-only format: the standard for recording sound to CD was codified in 1980, five years prior to the buttoning up of the CD-ROM standard. Even then, it would take several more years before economies of scale would finally become such that the games industry would be able to take advantage of the disc. And it would be even longer before the technology would be able to take root—the earliest adopters of CD media (besides the PC, which is always first) were fringe players, with NEC’s TurboGrafx CD the noted trailblazer for CD on console. It would be quickly followed by other quirky systems including the Amiga CDTV and the CD-i. The end of 1991 would see the market leader of the time acknowledge the format in the form of the Sega Mega CD, but even that was at best a limited success.

Although CD represented some tangible benefits over the cartridge formats of the period, it was by no means obvious that the disc would become the format of choice for games manufacturers. It had problems cartridges didn’t have, like a lack of durability (an SNES cart is more or less indestructible, whereas one scratch can permanently incapacitate a CD) and slow seek speeds that necessitated load times, the great bane of game pacing. Even its major advantage, the 650MB of space, started off as a disadvantage as developers used to 2MB cartridges or 1.44MB floppies struggled with how to fill this incredible new expanse.



This struggle produced early results both banal (the practice of piling dozens of floppy-based games on to CD, which gave us the term “shovelware”) and interesting (full orchestral scores on console titles, the “talkie” versions of adventure games), but nothing particularly ambitious. The format’s software breakthrough wouldn’t come until 1993, when the twin PC releases of The 7th Guest and Myst spurred drive adoption and set the industry down a treacherous path. Both games were potent cocktails of simple puzzle mechanics, high-res still graphics and low-res video, a multimedia blend that would have been impossible had it not been for the copious storage space of CD. A lot of developers misread the tea leaves here and turned the CD into the medium of choice for FMV games. This was fortunately short-lived.

The hardware breakthrough came for CD games in the form of the PlayStation. Although the use of CD was just one of many canny decisions Sony made in development of the console, it was an important one, as the biggest advantage CD has over cartridge is that it is cheap and a lot of them can be made quickly. This had obvious advantages for gamers, as CD allowed Sony to adopt the $50 pricing standard that represented a significant drop from the wild west of Nintendo cart prices. But it also had advantages for publishers, who no longer had to worry about sitting on expensive cartridge inventory should a game fail to sell and so could afford to gamble on riskier projects. This was a major contributing factor to the decade-long wane of Nintendo, which suffered enormously for its decision o stick to cartridge. It’s also partially responsible for the burst of creativity that happened in mid-90s game development. Works like Parappa the Rapper, Resident Evil, and Final Fantasy VII made lasting contributions to the medium at this time, contributions that may not have been possible without the advantages of CD.

The CD disappeared from consoles at the turn of the century, replaced with newer optical media technologies like DVD and GD-ROM (PC stuck with the format for quite a while longer, to ridiculous multi-CD effect). These newer formats are just evolutionary advances on the Compact Disc, however—this 70s-era technology continues to shape the medium to this day, and will for the foreseeable future.

Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week: