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1UP COVER STORY
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JUNE 25 | VIDEO GAME MUSIC FESTIVAL
The Red Book Diaries
Cover Story: Recorded audio was once a big deal for games, but its early use in CD games was short-lived. The story within.
T
he introduction of the Compact Disc as a data medium via the CD-ROM standard was expected to be a revolution, and it was. Personal computers had a whole new dimension of usefulness thanks to the advantages of CD capability. Games would be bigger, they’d say — both in scope and memory size. They could have video and voice; they could educate as well as entertain. The quality and fidelity of console games could match that of PC games, and we would all live in a multimedia utopia. Or something.
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, NEC and Sega had produced the first CD-ROM drives for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 and Mega Drive/Genesis, respectively. Both companies tried to push CDs as the format of the future, with a host of advantages over traditional cartridges, which cost more to manufacture and were limited in almost every aspect, from memory size to audio and graphics capability.
