What were the first Video Games on CD? - The Tech & The Games
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● Description
What were the first games ever released on CD? Today we explore the technology, the games and the approaches taken to putting them on CD.
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Fun fact: For No-Ri-Ko on PC Engine has tracks of Noriko Ogawa saying each individual syllable in the Japanese language. This was for a little surprise at the end of the game where she thanks you by name! Must've been heaven on earth for any Noriko stans who picked it up at launch, even if she did sound a bit like an amnesiac robot lol
That must have been fun to record.
@@MadMorgie6318
>That must have been fun to record.
I don't think it wouldn't have taken that long. google gojuuon. Aside from some exceptions there aren't a lot weird pronouncation rules and she probably could have knocked them out in ten minutes.
@@MadMorgie6318 Japanese is a syllabic language. With 46 basic characters you can represent almost all of the sounds.
Oh man, the first CD player I had was in my car in 1991 - how awesome would it have been to drag my computer out to run a line-out to my car to play some shareware titles on my C64. Damn, if I had only known this stuff existed then.
I just find it funny that (arguably) the very first PC CD titles were just shovelware. Talk about a taste of things to come!
I am amazed that the PC Engine CD went on to be a success in Japan, considering the price of admission back then (the interface unit and the CD drive were sold separately at a very high price for each!) and the software availalbe o_O
The following year only 15 titles came out, though to be fair, among the digital catalogue shovelware there was also the beautifully remastered Ys I.II, the oddball but highly enjoyable Red Alert, the seminal RPG Tengai Makyo and the then exclusive arcade conversion of Wonder Boy 3: Monster lair (the Megadrive version would only come out 1 year and a half later). Alas I`m certainly glad it did
Shovelware and Dizzy... (what a classic!)
@@daviderinaldi329 I believe, the CD module was also usable with some PC from NEC.
Also, normally PC Engine HuCards were already quite expensive, maybe CD could save money in a long run. AFAIK PC Engine releases were almost exclusively CD titles few years later.
Update: Please note No-Ri-Ko has been copyright claimed on this video. This means I have no control over any adverts which may be added to the video.
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Would you like to see that Codemasters CD in action? That video is now showing on early access to Official Cave Dwellers at patreon.com/retromancave - if you'd like to support the channel and get all videos 1 week early and free from adverts as well as other fun perks then please drop by. Thank you!
Neil - RMC
I did not expect those game collections :O amazing - my two cents? the Rainbow Arts CD is indeed the first 'random access' game(s) on CD - it's only a matter of encoding - it's ultimately digital.
I was about to suggest that.
What about the FM Towns? That came out in February 1989 and every computer had a built in 1X CD-ROM drive!
I had that CD and sold it on ebay, I never used it. Got about £30 for it. Those early CDs do go bad.
Oh yes, there will be a follow up video. Lots of great suggestions and the FM Towns is up there
I once bought a video CD called 'Manhole', but it was very different. I learned a lot that day.
Yeah it's also released on the PC Engine CD Rom². It's a sort of interactive fairy tale, heavily influenced by Alice in Wonderland.
@@fromthe90s21 I think you have misunderstood. Anonymous is alluding to purchasing gay pornography. I assume the 'Manhole' in the VCD he experienced was actually a gentleman's bumhole (or anus).
@@fromthe90s21 r/whoooosh
that was gold
@@jeffrey44 ahahahahaha
I have that Rainbow Arts CD in my collection. According to my list, I bought it for about 40 DM (aka 20 Euro). This sounds quite cheap, because the UVP was between 90 and 100 DM (45-50 Euro) at that time. But I am quite sure, that I got the CD before or around the time I bought an Amiga computer. And that was definetly in early 1990, just a couple of month before Graftgolds marvelous conversion of Rainbow Islands was released.
The compilation works like you said: It had an Adapter, which connected the C64 with a CD Player via the cassette port. The games were stored like the ones on the codemasters CD: as Red Book Audio. In fact, they stored every game twice, just in case the CD was slightly damaged at some point. So you could still load the games thanks to these backup tracks.
Between these tracks was some music from the famous composer Chris Hülsbeck: The complete soundtrack of the Amiga version of Hollywood Poker Pro, the Intro of Starball (also from Amiga) and the C64 intros of To be on Top, Danger Freak and Katakis. So this CD Rom was also the first CD based release of Hülsbecks music.
Last but not least: The collection itself was a remarkable unique compilation of very different games and from a lot of different publishers. The highlights were David's Midnight Magic, Impossible Mission, Loderunner and M.U.L.E. There was also Dropzone, Fist II, Leaderboard Golf, Mission Elevator and Solomon's Key. The only game from Rainbow Arts was Jinks, which also was quite good, but ironically the "worst" game of the whole bunch (but again with some asskicking music by Chris ;).
Yes, I had the same for the c64!
I did wonder whether you were going to include the Codemasters CDs and although I have never thought about which game came first I do agree with your sentiment. It's a game and you have loaded from a CD so it counts even if the standard format isn't used. Great and very interesting history, thanks.
After SONY rushed to release the first CD player (CDP-101) before Philips, they didn't include oversampling technology in the audio decoding circuitry which Philips player did and it was released a month later. This resulted in sound from the SONY player sounding worse than the Philips player (CD-100) although this CD player used 14bit DAC instead of 16bit.
My family obtained its first CD player in 1986. It was a Phillips machine and we used that thing for probably 20 years.
First one I saw was a Marantz my grandfather had and it had a clear front so you could see the CD. I wish I'd kept it.
@@6581punk The Marantz was a masterpiece I wish I kept mine, however I did keep the mentioned SONY and Philips unit.
@@VladoT Marantz CD-73, it was slow but dropping the CD onto the spindle was really nice. Especially kicking myself given the asking price of them on ebay.
pretty much all "first gen" CD players were terrible in one way or another. Either they were too complicated and broke down within months or had reading issues or other really big problems. Finding any of those first gen CD players in working order today is extremely rare if not unheard of. Out of all of them, the Pioneer's P-D1 seems to be the only one that "sometimes" can be found in moderately working order and they were smart enough to build it "slightly" less complicated and they broke down "slightly" less often, the rest are paper weights mostly now.
@RetroManCave everytime I hear you say CD-ROM, I now expect a second ROM.
😁
I think there's someone to be said for being designed for the format like The 7th Guest. Wikipedia is only willing to go as far as, "It is one of the first computer video games to be released only on CD-ROM." Interesting details about the early days none the less.
As soon as I saw the title I thought "Myst".
crazy how a lot of people forgot about 7th Guest which came out before Myst on DOS. I remember lots of people talking about that game.
My thoughts went to Mechwarrior 2 and that badass CD intro.
My heart wants to say The 7th Guest, as will a lot of people I'm sure. "Content designed specifically for the CD format". Based on Wikipedia info, it was 5 months before MYST too. But I'm not here to quibble with that Codemasters CD compilation! Wow.
Oh, there were "Myst style" games well before that. The Journeyman Project beat both 7th Guest and Myst, coming out in January 1993. And in *1991* was one called Spaceship Warlock on Mac, that nobody seems to remember, despite being one of the very first original games made specifically for computer CDs.
The first CD-ROM drive I bought came with 7th guest bundled.
With that reasoning The manhole shouldn't count either since it wasn't created for CD from the beginning.
@@PaperHunter yes I think I had the same :) iirc it was a 2x Speed CD-ROM and around 145 gbp.
Absolutely halarious that the cd music on fighting street sounded super clear and amazing yet the voice samples sounded like it was recorded in 2bits and recorded over a telephone handset.
Ohhhhhrrrr rite
Creative uses. Compressing the data onto CD to achieve 20 seconds loading times is quite impressive.
Im guessing the cable that plugged into the joystick port had an a/d converter that turned the sound into emulated button/direction inputs to get the binary 1s and zeros into the computer. Thats a beautiful bit of creative design.
LGR and Technology Connections Vs RMC and Techmoan.... Fight!
Techmoan throwing the vinyls, me swinging the Amstrad CPC
Technology Connections delivering all the snark. LGR with Duke Nukem one liners and getting an RPG from a thrift store.
@@ic_trab spat my drink lmao
Still better than KSI-Logan Paul.
And the referee will be the 8-bit guy?
Considering you're diving more into the PCE history, especially on the CD side of things, you should look into Ys Book 1 & 2 on that system sometime. Not the first version of that game, that would be PC-98, but this version has very likely the first proper videogame dub from Japanese to English, featuring a lot of popular Saturday morning cartoon VAs, like Alan Oppenheimer and Jim Cummings. And, if you want to see how far this was pushed forward on the same system, look into Dawn of Ys on the same system. It has some absolutely stunning cutscenes and managed to split the voicework and music separately from each other.
Game is very good too. It's at the start of the Japanese action RPG styling, continuing a lot of what the developers started with Dragon Slayer, which basically turned Rogue into a more simple action format. Series is still going to this day too.
And you didn't even mention the fantastic CD music for Ys 1 & 2, courtesy of a young Yuzo Koshiro...
Ryo Yonemitsu also did the arrangements for Dawn of Ys, and those are, to this day, my favorite renditions of that music. Far beyond what Falcom did to it years later with Memories of Celceta.
"The first music CD" caught me - it needs a few caveats. The Chopin CD is the first CD produced. The first CDs released were 50 titles concurrently, with a Billy Joel having the first catalogue number. Having done a bit of independent research, these two claims (first produced and first batch released for sale) have held up in my own digging. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_player#First_Red_Book_CDs_and_players - As far as the first CD game, context is important, so they're all differently true and valid.
There are CDs that predate those listed there, like the Sony YEDS-1 demonstration from 1982, I had a very badly damaged copy of this. Hope to find a playable copy someday but it’s very rare, and it seems no good rip of this exists. It would be nice to see someone preserve it considering it is part of the early history of the format.
ABBA were the first to press, though! well, after the Chopin, but ABBA were pretty keen early adopters and had an all-digital studio by 1981, that was one of the top-of-the-line studios in all of europe.
@@ExperimentIV Yeah, there's the issue of manufacture date versus release date. What's probably more true of ABBA, and arguably more important, is that they were definitely more involved with digital production, with that album being one of the first. Billy Joel's "52nd Street", for example, was just a reissue on CD of an album released several years before. None of the other artists released that day in the 50-CD opening were pioneers in digital production, either. That's something ABBA was interested in very early on.
@@delusionnnnn the fact that everyone in ABBA were - and are - music tech nerds is one of the little reasons that make me love them more!
@@ExperimentIV They're not really my thing, but I do like "One Night in Bangkok" from the Chess musical, which charted as a radio hit, which is ABBA-related, even if my favourite version is the Razor Skyline version (industrial dance, most of their other stuff is bad), I like the original, too.
David Gregg and James Russell; two dudes who both pioneered the CD, and also had first names for both names. Huh.
OK so now I understand the bizarre Twitter photo you posted of a Speccy plugged into the CDROM-ROM drive :)
My father worked at the BBC and had the very first one of two Sony units in the UK, which we borrowed for a bit at home. Anyone who knows about audio, he was one of the people who developed the Ls3/5a Rogers speakers. After testing the CD unit on my mother, who said, wow that sounds good, can we have one, he went out and bought the CDP101, or whatever that unit was, it cost about 500 pound in 1981... Thats a shed load of money.
Just for info Sony sent to units to the BBC for testing at the time. One which we had at home...
Anyway, little bit of info for those who care.
"I just wanna crack some skulls / ...can I please beat someone up now?" said in the least convincing way possible by a genteel bloke in a suit jacket. ;D
I don't think the audio one should count. it's not different from a cassette, it could have been a vinyl record or anything that plays audio. it's not like a "real cd game".
Aaaah, brings back memories, buying my first single speed CD ROM drive for my 386 Packard Bell. Spending a week getting the damn thing to work, finally discovering a conflicting IRQ channel and squeeling with delight when LOOM finally booted. Aaaah the last leaf of autumn....
IRQ conflicts! great memories😏
Sparkster 2301 IRQ conflicts, those were the days!
Ah yes, those were the days when once a CD-ROM drive and a suitable soundcard was installed in your PC, you could claim to have a "Multimedia" (the BUZZ word) PC!
always such well-informed, gentlemanly videos. thanks for that.
I thought you were going there - I remember looking into this approach in, oh, about 1990 to get games into my C64 - never did try it though, as I couldn't afford a CD player a t the time.
I don't think most of us could at that point. The first CD player I can remember my family getting was in my oldest brother's 88 Pontiac Firebird around late 93 that he had installed himself along with an entire speaker/sub setup, after working one of his first jobs all summer, and then some to afford it along with CD's to play on it, then shortly after that units started to drop in price fairly fast.
In 1989 the cheapest CD player on the market was £100. I was about to buy one when a colleague, who had just upgraded, offered me his second hand Hitachi for £60 so I bought that. The expensive bit was the Audio CDs which cost about £12 each. When I finally swapped the Hitachi for a Philips CDi player I realised what poor quality sound the Hitachi had.
Great video, as usual! One question remains, though: Which title was the first commercially released standard compliant Yellow Book ISO:9660 game?
It's a good question, something to add to the list of things for a potential follow up video thank you
I think it may be Loom for DOS, from 1990.
@@LordSenile Yes, you're right. I thought I remembered seeing a 1990 copyright on my copy, though that appears to be a mistake on my part.
Jeepers, had to doubletake at that Thumbnail :O
Lol I know i though surely the crazy Japanese adult anime style stuff wasn't first on CD 🤣
We all did, interesting colour palette for a boat.
OK OK I'll change it you terrible bunch of filth merchants 😂
@@RMCRetro well my first thought upon seeing the thumbnail went to pretty naughty places... ☺️
@@RMCRetro LOL, my first thought as well..... haha
id Software's Quake came out on a mixed mode CD with the music tracks (from Nine Inch Nails) stored in standard Red Book audio format. As this game didn't use disc-based copy protection, and didn't actually care what music tracks it played, you could put in any standard audio CD and have the music of your choice playing in the game. I used to play with Rawlin's Cross playing.
I remember this was the case with Grand Theft Auto as well. I seem to associate Radioheads The Bends with that game now because it was always in the CD drive
I had no idea cleaner sound from CD could directly translate into a higher bitrate for demodulating into ram, but it makes sense
Very Interesting !
I am with you --- The Rainbow Arts (+ CodeMasters) were the first Computer Games on CD.
The fact it's an Audio CD is irrelevant, as nobody makes that distinction for a Cassette Game.
While I agree that the audio-format game CDs deserve a mention, it's not actually digital data being transferred from the CD to the computer. It's digital information on the CD and it's digital information in the computer, but to transfer that data it's converted to analogue first and then converted to DIFFERENT digital information, it operates similarly to a modem rather than a peripheral (though the modulation, in this instance, is done before the CD is pressed). The file system is completely immaterial to the discussion, if the digital data on the CD is the same digital data being processed by the processor then that is a data CD even if it's using the Red Book standard. Audio cassette technology simply isn't robust enough to store digital data properly, but there are still digital magnetic tapes (both audio and data), and I'd make the same distinction there.
@@StarkRG I think it may count simply because the process is essentially how those 8-bit computers were designed to recieve data in the first place.
@@another3997 Because, even though it's digital data, it's digital data encoding an analogue signal, modulated audio, not raw digital data that can be used by the processor. On a CD-ROM the data on the disc is the same data that's used by the processor.
As for the phrase "just semantics", semantics is the meaning of words, it's extremely important if you're trying to have a discussion or convey ideas.
@A Gentleman I didn't say they aren't digital games, obviously they are, but their data is not stored digitally, it's stored in modulated analogue audio which is stored digitally. If I printed the source code on a CD label and handed you the CD would you consider that to be a game distributed on CD? The game is there, and it's obviously on a CD, if the format doesn't matter than that should count.
I actually remember reading the review of the Codemasters games CD back in Your Sinclair, from what I understand its just a collection of audio recordings on the CD. As in, they're just 'music' tracks and you played them the same as you did with a standard cassette deck - LOAD"" and then pressed play on your CD player, which (as a pre-teen in the 80's) I of course didn't have.
I'd exclude the Codemasters games (as well as Rainbow Arts) as being the the first CD games as the host computer has no way of interacting with the storage medium - it's just a modulated audio signal being played back. It's not an IO device, the data is neither encoded in a form that the host can access nor is there any way for the microprocessor to load data it needs from the storage medium; all the other examples do. Compared to both the first examples shown from both the PC-Engine and Mac, the Spectrum had no way of interacting with the technology; it could be from a gramophone for all the Speccy cared.
All the other examples are digital data stored on the disc - the Spectrum/Codemasters example is just a set of tracks containing the waveforms of tape noises quantized down to 16bit 44KHz audio samples. Saying 'thats how the computer worked' is wrong - the various Speccy microdrives, floppy interfaces and rom addons show that it didn't just load data via the mic socket; they (along with the PC-Engine and Mac examples) are mechanisms of direct access to files using a filesystem (whether you consider it 'standard' or not), a table of contents and operations that allow to open directories, seek through files and read data. Neither the storage device, or the 'data' stored on the Codemasters discs allowed that. As far as technology goes, it should be excluded for that reason.
What strength!!! But don't forget there are many guys like you all over the world
This is far better than the title suggests.... interesting video.
If it's a game and it comes on a CD, that's good enough for me.
Can you do a video about the first game released on dvd too.
That sounds fun! I wonder what it was
@@RMCRetro Tex Murphy: Overseer from 1998 seems to be a good candidate.
Riven maybe?
Wikipedia says that Wing Commander IV was upgraded from multi-disc CD-ROM to a DVD-ROM release in 1997. That's pretty early; it had to rely on a standalone hardware DVD decoder card that not many people had....
Great video!! Congrats!!
I missed a mention to the The Games Collection, a MSX CD compilation which was published in 1988. You can find a good picture here: www.msx.org/es/node/57848
I knew about the Codemasters C64 CD system but I had no idea about the Rainbow Arts one. Too bad they didn't really take advantage of the technology. We could have had great games with Chris Huelsbeck's Red Book audio tracks.
From the list of games, it looks like most of them were single load cassette games. The only exception appears to be Leaderboard. Perhaps if the CD audio format was more successful it could have led to much more ambitious releases.
My first CD games came with my first PC as a kid in 1996: an IBM Aptiva running Windows95 with Microsoft Plus, a Pentium90, 8 MB of RAM, onboard SVGA graphics, and a 28.800 modem. It came bundled with Caesar II, the Journeyman Project Turbo!, MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat and its expansion Ghost Bear's Legacy, and Torin's Passage...great memories indeed!
P.S. The absolute kicker with this PC was the inclusion of the original MechWarrior from Dynamix on a single 3 1/2" floppy disk...still have it but have no way of playing it outside of resorting to running DosBox.
A sponsor that isn't "my favorite mobile game even though I obviously don't play mobile games or ever talk about them" or some VPN, and is kinda relevant? I let that one play.
Same
I agree with your conclusions! The mechanisms aside, digital data read into memory equals game on CD-ROM.
The CD Rom & Rebel Assault was what sold me over to the PC from the Amiga. Ah the good old days of paying 5,000 pounds + (cash) for a single speed Kodak CD Writer and 20 pounds each for the blank discs !!
to me the first "cd game" isn't so much about if it came on a CD or not but if it used the extra stuff that CD-ROM allowed.. like how Loom that you have on the shelf in the background used CDA for in-game speech
I am surprised that you went through the history of optical media without mentioning LDROM. 1983's Dragons Lair and the 1986 BBC Domesday project had already shown the potential of optical media so it was inevitable that people would try to do something similar with Laserdisc's little brother.
My first game on the PC was Magic Carpet by Bullfrog in 1995, with a x2 Mitsumi CDROM drive and proprietary controller. I then swapped my SB pro 2 for a SB AWE32 and the used the integrated mitsumi controller, until I swapped the drive for a NEC SCSI 3x, very able to clog the ISA bus... Old times PC...
I don't know how I missed this video, but … definitely the PC Engine is a valid CD-ROM game, even if your PC can't read its filesystem. Still Yellow Book. The Codemasters and Rainbow Arts do not count as CD-ROM technically since they're Red Book and not Yellow, but they are the first games on CD for a personal computer. Technically correct is the most important kind of correct.
That said if it's a game on CD and it's fun to play, then … that's what really matters, isn't it?
The FM Towns released in february 1989 with a bunch of CD-Rom games. It's also the first system that allows the cdrom drive to boot into either the operating system (it was on the CD on release) or straight into the game.
Reading through the archive of Ace magazine it seems that there was a CD-ROM version of Defender of the Crown available for the first PC CD-ROM drive in 1989. It had EGA graphics and an 'orchestral' soundtrack. Whether this predated the Manhole, or if any were sold or have survived I don't know, but I've never heard of it outside the pages of Ace.
I'd be interested in seeing that 20 minute test video. I had been wondering about CD audio for 8-bit micro games, I'm going to count those CDs as legit, personally. That track loading prompt is pretty fantastic in my book. Wouldn't wanna scratch it though!
Lets face it. All CD's are a series of 1's and 0's. Even audio CD's. Read WikiPedia. Redbook is defined as one continuous stream of LPCM audio data with a smaller subset of 8 subcode data streams. You can play most CD-ROM's in a audio cd player and get a horrible noise out of it. Does that mean all CD-ROM's are audio? I am with you. It is a game on a CD, that makes it a computer game CD.
I think, if Commodore got to claim slapping floppy disk games on a CD for the CD32 made them CD games, then we have to grant that transposing tape loading to CD must also count. I’d be curious for a further investigation, what was the first CD exclusive on a home computer? That is to say, what was the first game computer owners had no other way to play but to stump up for a CD-ROM?
I think idea of using an audio cd for program loading is quite clever. It’s using already existing technology of loading software but on a new medium. I mean cassettes didn’t have a filesystem for loading the software. To me the idea makes perfect sense, it’s native to the 8 bit micro’s as they expect an audio waveform anyway and you have the benefit of skipping to a specific track instead of spooling the tape to load a specific program. It’s shame that the idea didn’t catch on, as it’s actually pretty neat. Apple have been quite annoying with their HFS cd-rom’s as it’s difficult to image them on a modern pc. I have a demo cd for the Korg X3 synthesizer and it’s a mixed mode cd. Sadly the filesystem is of the Macintosh variaty instead of the more common iso format. I’m glad that Sega used the iso filesystem on the Mega-CD. One game in particular is a bit odd, which is jurassic Park. It uses the audio tracks for the ambient dinosaur sounds and the FM chip for the music.
Very interesting indeed! A lot of stuff I didn't know about, such as the Spectrum games on a CD, and I was an avid Spectrum owner at the time!
I will never forget playing Ys on CD for the first time back in 1990
Ys: Book I and II and Ys III: Wanderers from Ys on the TG-CD were awesome...still disappointed that Ys IV: Dawn of Ys didn't get a translated western release.
"Have a biscuit baby" is my new pickup line. Guaranteed to work every time :D
If code is delivered via CD it should be considered as such.
That said, sure, the first games on CD-ROM were released in 1989 according to those info bits.
I remember buying 7th Guest at the same time as my Panasonic double speed (omg, DOUBLE!) drive, you had to put the CD into a caddy to load it! I managed to persuade my parents to buy me the drive for Christmas, and the NASA Voyager datasets too. Back then I had to write my own software to manipulate the image data!
An electric car is a car. A fossil fuelled car is a car. They both achieve the same end result of transportation. Therefore, I agree with your opinion. If a game can be loaded from a CD, regardless of the encoding, it’s a CD-based game. You never specified, ‘the first game on CD-ROM.’
Remember Wolf Team Sega, they made 2 games for the Sega CD called Cobra Command and Road Avenger, they were copies of the old 1984 arcade games that were on disc like Dragons Lair was, they were on 12 inch discs inside the arcade machine.
If it loads off a CD then it counts. Does not matter how many times it does it, if that was true is Ridge Racer on the PlayStation counted as it loads the whole game in to ram, the only thing it reads after that is red book audio, hell you can swap cds and play it with a Pink Floyd CD in there instead.
Fascinating stuff, Neil! Outstanding work.
13:33 _Paper, Rock, Scissors_
Saying it in this order should be considered a crime
✊✊✋
I still wonder... How many bytes of red book audio did they have to use for each byte of program data?
And this is why i love your channel alongside Techmoan's, as you both bring a "European" angle to tech history that far too often gets completely ignored by mainstream, US-centric, tech media.
i feel the same as you cuz both reads from the cd no matter the format.
that Digital noise reminds me of modem lol XD :D
I love first conversion Space ace, and Dragon's lairs on Amiga from floppy!
First Amiga CDTV, Amiga CD 32 bit, and new AmigaOS4 NG for the future 3D ! 👍💪
I remember seeing adverts for cd games on the amstrad 464 don't know if anything was released, might find something in the old amstrad mags
It turned out to be vapourware, sadly. The CPC press, mainly Amstrad Action, covered it well in advance of the release that never happened. Would have been nice, 30 games on one audio CD, due to be priced at £19.99 IIRC.
@@rachel.mcgowan I too remember AA News announcing the CD Codemasters games. Christ, I feel old now. Was it really 1989? I had a first edition copy of Issue 0 of AA (the cyclops one) & remember when they gave a free game on a tape stuck to the cover but I can't remember what it was. AA was a good read back in the day.
@@rachel.mcgowan Yes,I remember the Amstrad Action coverage too. Now ,decades on,I'm a bit miffed to find out it was only released on the Commodore and Spectrum.
As you know, PCB stands for Perifractic's Cavedweller Bonus. Doesn't it? ;P
Fighting street: "You're good but I've seen better. Bli bla blu."
15.05 Let’s beat the fuck outta of each other in front of Mt. Rushmore.
The Fujitsu FM Towns was the first micro computer to have games and software on CD. It was released in 1989 and came with a CD drive built-in. Even the OS (TownsOS) was booted from CD! I have some of the games from 1989, like After Burner for example, as well as an early version of TownsOS (V1.1 from late 1989, not sure when V1.0 was released exactly).
In 1985, the Philips CM-100 external CD-ROM drive for the PC was already released with the first piece of software being an encyclopaedia. That was two years before Microsoft's Bookshelf.
Do you happen to know the name of the encycopedia? I'd like to track that down, I'm expecting to make a follow up video at some point with any new examples learned along the way. Great shout with Afterburner
@@RMCRetro Can't remember, sadly. But it was shown in one of the episodes of Computer Chronicles from 1985. That's how I learnt about it.
btw, let me know if you need any pictures etc. from that early FM Towns stuff.
@@RMCRetro en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grolier#Grolier_on_CD-ROM
That's the one. Grolier's Academic American Encyclopedia.
Perfect thank you, stored away for a follow up and to find out if it was commercially released or not. Thanks for the links
Very good research!👍
He finally answers the title's question around 11:14.
"Well doesn't that sound jolly nice? But I wanna crack some skulls!"
That's got to be one of the most British sentences I've ever heard! 😂
The biggest boom for Computer related CD hardware was for readers and writers due to the "Blobby CD's" in the early 90's that was in every computer club around the country.
Ghost was first in the UK. Blobby second and Playdoh third. I knew Both Blobby and Playdoh personally.
Myst sold a lot of CD Drives back in the day. I remember my first CD-ROM game was Star Wars Dark Forces. But I was a late adopter because of the cost of everything involved ie. sound card, drive and all...
Funnily enough the Amiga got Myst...but not until 1998 and it needed 8mb RAM. But if you look at the terrible Town With No Name or Psycho Killer all the elements are there, including a HUD-less adventure style where you just click on elements on the screen. This is the style The Manhole had, and the Devs of that went on to make Myst. So it's not impossible to think the CDTV might have released a quality game in the same style in 1991/2 and had its killer app.
Ah yes. Sony helps sets the standard, Sony manufactures the hardware, Sony publishes the albums, Sony records the music. Nothing shady there.
Sony didn't have a records division at the time, they bought out Columbia Records after they fought Sony hard to make the DAT tape a failure over copying concerns.
Ooh, I hope you go a bit deeper down the rabbit hole and see if there were games on other optical media that predate the use of CD's. Great vid.
There are laserdisc games and laserdisc predates the cd. Not sure if the games do too, but it is pretty likely.
@@wich1 i believe Dragon's Lair is from 1981, which predates even the Codemasters compilation
I played the floppy disk version of Manhole back in the day. The sound samples are truly terrible.
Another well researched episode. Thanks for the history lesson.
I can think of laser disk games before this, Techmoan has featured them and they are way before 1989
Absolutely. If you were there at the time Dragons Lair was the game everyone was talking about when it came out. I know its not a game but have a look at th-cam.com/video/VLh5LR0Kf1I/w-d-xo.html Since it was complied by schools, almost every kid in the UK would have known about it but sadly, due to the price of the hardware few got to see it.
You got mail Sir, with more info on the C64 CD-ROM. :-)
Great video! Love the detail! And I had no idea about the improved load times on the Code Masters collection nor did I know it worked via the control port! :o
Fantastic video! enjoyed...
Very nice episode.. Bravo..
"Have a biscuit baby!" Love it 😀
Mind..... blown..... away!! 🤯🤯 I had absolutely no idea of a CD format published for the spectrum. Rubber key my introduction to the computing and gaming world, followed by the Amstrad CPC 464, then back to a Spectrum +2. Amiga was the first time I was to get my hands onto games on CDROM via the PCMCIA slot drives.
To think these ideas were being developed way before was such an interesting insight.
I’m definitely on the side that these then are indeed the rightful owner to the rights of first games on CD. Regardless of ongoing load during play, they were indeed stored on a CD media.
Brilliant.
Excellent video thanks
Commodore 8-bit wins this one, imho.
Where's oregon trail? lol
Amazingly that didn't seem to get a CD version until 1996
15:48 Oh god I remember Man-Hole that was the First CD based game I ever played as a little kid and I wasted HOURS trying to figure everything out..
Cool I have the rainbow arts one with adapter :D
All of that was quite interesting, but left me thirsting for more. I agree the Rainbow Arts CD clearly meets the definition of a CD Rom, as is was accessed more than once in a game session. I remember the first multimedia computer here in the states to be the Tandy Sensation, which was bundled with MS Bookshelf. The first multimedia kit was the LMSI (Laser Magnetic Storage Institute) single speed drive with a spring loaded tray, and it was bundled with the Media Vision Pro AudioSpectrum Sound Card, and a proprietary connector. The pack in title was Mega Race, a crude but fun 3d game. I wonder how many multimedia kits were sold just to play Myst, and The Seventh Guest?
The first CDs I've seen apart from music ones was The7th Guest and those other softwares coming with Creative Labs CD-rom kit. Encarta and Encyclopedia Britanica was it?
What about "The Games Collection" for the MSX? That has both the loader and the games on the CD, uses the cassette port and appeared to have been released in 1988:
www.generation-msx.nl/software/eurosoft/the-games-collection/release/2452/#rel_2585
Excellent thank you, another one to explore on a follow up video
@@RMCRetro That will be quick: while the compilation was ready for a 1988 November release, the police sized the stocks because of a judicial investigation and the stock has been kept under their scrutiny until April of 1989, when it was finally and actually released. So, interestingly, NEC released the first commercial game on CD (No-Ri-Ko, according to catalogue numbers) only because of an overzealous Dutch police. (And this is why our time was better than today's time. ;-)
Neil, i realy love the use of the scanline effect on the old sd-quality video images! I hope that you've set a trend here for historical video on TH-cam. Regular upscaled images just look bad on modern displays..
Well, considering that many popular well respected reviewers still upload improperly deinterlaced videos, this is really great. But even better - use a good CRT shader, maybe even with some curvature.
Got my Philips CDD-521 cd recorder back in 1994 and I remember the 8.3 filename format but there was also limit on the depth of the directory structure so it was an hassle to fill an cd in the first iso9660 format and get it working, also the first CDR was also only 63min was it was not easy to make backups of cds there was bigger.
And the CDR’s was very expansive
Oooh a brand new RMC upload! I know what I'm watching before work
Fascinating stuff! I still love CDs and still prefer to listen to music and play games from discs. I think the first CD-ROM game I got was Doom and the last was certainly Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth which required me to shuffle a stack of CDs into and out of my PC in order to install it. After that, I switched to getting games on DVD-ROM. Much to the amusement of fellow members of PC gaming groups on social media, I still insist on installing optical drives on my self-built PCs. They think I'm a 'dinosaur' and silly for still trying to find and play music, software and games on physical CDs, CD-ROMs, and DVD-ROMs. I do have some online only games now, but lament that I can't get them on DVD-ROM, especially when my internet service is on the blink.
First CD-Rom experience for this American chap: Myst for the Mac, then I finally got my first PC, a 486/sx25 Acer prebuilt from a local shop. With that MAMMOTH purchase (monitor, system, generic mouse/keyboard, CD-Rom, Sound Card (SB16), CH Flight Stick Pro, SW: Rebel Assault, Strike Commander (EA ♥ this game!) and finally Wolfenstein 3D totaled $2,900 (over $5,000 today... for a 486 win 3.1 system... wow, mom THANK YOU!!) in 1993. These were my first loves in CD-Rom gaming. From 1993 to 2020 I've been a PC gamer, even if I did start on the NES I saw the massive potential in PC gaming. I had more unique games, gore filled games, adult games (leisure suit larry haha) and of course, pirated games.... hey blame the store where I got my system from. The salesman sold me a burned copy of Spear of Destiny, Rambo, Arachnophobia, Commander Keen Kollection, Hexen and a few more for like $20 a title. PC gaming back then was much more difficult compared to today, boot disks that would literally try to trick your system into performing in a certain way. Sound issues? Boot disk. Not enough memory? Boot disk. Joystick inop? Boot disk. Friend pissing you off about playing some stupid game you have no interest in? Boot disk so the game runs like crap or doesn't work at all... hahaha those were the days. When every game released had a Tech Support Line you could call and they would help you create a boot disk. When you could go to CompUSA and return any piece of software within 30 days, for any reason. Don't like the game? Game too short? Copied the game to 3.5 floppies? Return the retail package, photocopy the manual/key card for their "anti piracy" codes/keys and get another. Seriously one major reason that chain died so long ago, they made no money on software 😂😂Sorry for the rant, videos like this get me all sentimental and crap. Loved the video and now a sub, really liked this!!
What was I looking at in the thumbnail??
That's boat, it appears in the video
FM Towns games like Rayxander, Zak McKracken, Indiana Jones, Bubble Bobble, Viewpoint, Flashback, Loom, Raiden Densetu, Chase HQ and few others before it moved over to FM Towns Marty which ran all the same games as it was compatible with the original FM Towns machine released in Feb 89