"The bigger the adventure, the better the game (in theory) and for big games what better platform than CD-ROM. We’ll say straight off then that Zelda’s Adventure is possibly the best suited game so far licensed for Philip’s CD-i machine. Zelda games have been massive hits for the SNES and Game Boy due mainly to their drawn out explorative gameplay and complexity. So imagine, if that same quality of gameplay can be matched on the CD-i, but ehanced dramatically with beautiful photo definition graphics."
Computer and Video Games, Issue 152, July 1994
"The single most underrated component of video and computer games since their inception has been sound. Music, speech and sound effects can all be tremendousiy significant elements in the creation of a successful game, yet only in the past few years has this significance been exploited by software and hardware developers. Three things have been paramount in creating this burgeoning audio revolution: sound boards, 16-bit videogame systerns, and CD technology. Sound boards brought music, sound effects and even speech to the MS-DOS universe. The 16-bit systems introduced videogamers to stereo sound and CD promises to bring state-of-the-art audio to the video and computer game environment."
Bill Kunkel and Joyce Worle, Electronic Games, Volume 1 Issue 1, September 1992
"Ultimately, how good the games are is what will decide which platforms attract a viable audience, and which are back-of-theshelf curiosities. That's why Nintendo's decision to stay with the cartridge for the Ultra 64 shook the industry. The virtues of CD are well-known: beautiful graphics, full stereo sound, and tons of memory. Throw in FMV and a manufacturing cost less than 5% of most cartridges."
Arnie Katz, Electronic Games, Volume 2 Issue 12, September 1994
Background
This project started with this one very mundane thought I had: Wow. The disc must be history's most boring format. It's flat, it's brittle, and it has no satisfying weight to it. Collector's value of these things are only ever about what is stored on them, and this storage solution is so unreliable that the gamer snobs are never going to put the most valuable copies back into the player in which it belongs.
This thought later developed into something else. Is there a single person in this universe that values the CD beyond its storage capabilities? Why am I not one of those people? If they exist, where are they? As such, in June of 2025 I started drafting on the following:
Works cited: Shahani, C. J., Manns, B., & Youket, M. (2003). Longevity of CD media: research at the library of congress. Preservation Research and Testing Division, Washington, DC.
My concern about the CD-ROM faced a rather lukewarm reception at the time. My paper was successful in the way that it stuck to the curriculum, but I never really nailed down why this was actually important as a project, or why it would be worth pursuing further. Yet I couldn't get this stupid problem out of my head. Why is this important? No, rather, why is the CD-ROM not important?? I exited my first study with the following takeaways:
Little research has been done on the actual longevity of the CD-ROM.
The CD is making a comeback in the music industry, but the game industry remains untouched as a point of interest and an industry of reprints does not exist.
Almost every study on the CD-ROM is only a study about something adjacent that does not specifically niche itself on the disc.
Video Games
Games has as of 2026 failed to become streamable in the same accessible way as music and movies. Just like its brethren, however, the modern game industry is ruled by the cloud. If you love indie games you download one on Steam, and for the retro experience you pay Nintendo Switch Online's $19.99 USD/year subscription to get access to their digital collection. This is how the industry sells you convenience, but it has been proven again and again what drawbacks that occur: When the service is gone, so are your games. Online service games with empty servers become unplayable, and when NVIDIA decides to start piping their DLSS 5 into your favorite titles, you are suddenly roped into consenting to a technology you never asked to recieve when you first purchased your copy. Physical media can also break and disappear. When the disc is cracked and the scratches get too deep, the CD is likelier to end up in a landfill rather than being melted back into new plastic. Within this age of trash and crashes, could any of these examples be called an ultimate format?
Being born at the very end of the 90's meant that the CD-ROM was my primary mode of video gaming. I grew up playing games on the PC, Wii and Xbox 360, and I grew up loving video games. I never just loved games for the journey that was stored on the disc, it was my interest in hardware that ulimately guided me toward game development in my teens. My game developer dreams were not realized, but I have found myself a place where I can do the next best thing: contributing to video games as a serious topic of study from both a cultural and material perspective.
In the humanities we read books, we watch movies, and now we even make media analyses on social media phenomenon. When video games appear, we speak about the wonders of interactivity for a week and then spend the rest of the year on the books again. Video games has surrounded me my entire life, yet it remains a technology that is yet to be widely accepted in formal research. My professors like to tell me that plenty of research is being done on the topic, but I am not satisfied with this niche where we simply sing the praises of the narratorial capabilities afforded by play. I believe that video games can't be considered a fully realized academic discipline until they are treated like film in the curriculum. We do not just make space for film as mere entertainment in schools. It is also not unusual to watch film adjacent to a lesson in a historical period, analysis of its cinematography, all the while highlighting the importance of its cultural impact.
I'm still being asked why this thesis is going to be about video games on CD, when the music and film industry is arguably the more appropriate entryway into the topic. Indeed, it was in music that the medium was born, and it was in film that the CD truly found its footing. Games continue to lag behind, and they will continue to do so if we fail to include them in the realm of materialist media theory and format studies. Here is where I aim to find out what the CD-ROM once represented, and asking whether its material qualities is any indication of a more predictable time in gaming history.
The avarage gamer knows that this journey started on the arcade before the 'game pak'; but what was up with the fact that Nintendo was releasing CD-ROM games on the PC in 1993, three full years before choosing cartridge as their storage solution for the Nintendo 64? On the topic of these Educational Mario Games for the PC, I am myself the proud owner of a 1994 original copy of Mario's Time Machine—a rarity by online standards, but a copy that was considered garbage in the local thrift store. CD peripherals have now become a costly addition to most systems, and physical copies continue to be more expensive than digital downloads. Disc readers for PC is now merely a hobbyists addition. Yet at the same time, the regular old CD-ROM of less famous titles are still easily found in the second hand bargain bins, much unlike the cartridge.
Let's revisit the word retro for a moment. Do you consider the first Playstation console 'retro enough'? If so, what's up with the fact that cartridge remains the primary icon of old video game hardware?
What is considered a game has its own unique set of semantics. Perhaps the cartridge screams so much more 'GAME' because the format is exclusive to its industry. -It's the cassette of video games!
Digital Humanities
As interesting as it is to write an entire 50-page paper outlining the history of the CD-ROM in the games industry, my thesis doesn't just serve as a retrospective. After having recieved some interest in what it is that defines the Digital Humanities (DH) field, I will also use this section to outline the aim and research method of the thesis as a DH project.
