It’s been ten years since CD-ROM drives became affordable (prices dropped from $700 to $200 in 1993), and I’ve been asked to write a piece about the rise (and fall) (and rise) of the CD-ROM as a medium. As part of this, I’m doing a little retrospective of the best CD-ROMs of the decade.
It feels a bit odd to hive-off CD-ROM as a category. There’s something very 1996 about doing that. It does mean something, though: a package that depends on permanent storage rather than pulling data off the Net; whose form is melded around slow-access times, and perhaps nodding to that “digital book” ideal.
I’m guess I’m looking for apps that exploited the CD-ROM form well, and perhaps lived up to that all-to-brief moment of being the forefront of “interactive multimedia”, but have still managed to survive the test of time.
Me, I have a soft-spot for Voyager’s Spinal Tap, which not only set the standard for video CD-ROM, but I think defined how DVD bonus material would be executed. And I think I’ll include the original Myst (even though I’m a bit loathe to include every game too big to fit on floppies), because its rendered gameplay was such a ingenious exploitation of the large size of CD-ROMs, rather than clever programming. And then there’s the You Don’t Know Jack, spin-offs of which I still see for sale.
What are your favourites? All suggestions ungratefully purloined.