“Why not just have a library filled with computers and CD-ROMs and copies of Encarta,” they’d say. CD-ROM drives were popping up everywhere, and even people you would call intelligent were discussing the possibility of something like Microsoft Encarta ’95 being of higher worth than an actual all-encompassing, book shelf destroying, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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Why with this small circle of joy you can be in control of your very own TV studio, walk through fancy galleries from all over the world, and who knows, maybe even find love.” It’s hard to convey the fascination the world had for a brief period in the 1990s with multimedia. That’s right, with this baby right here, and what the science guys back at the lab have told me is called a CD, and not that other D my doctor told me about, you can turn your very own computer into a machine of pure imagination. "Well today and today only I’m gonna tell you about a brand spanking, supertastic, fandazzling new sensation in home computing called multimedia. I’m talking movies, music, magazines, and the ‘ol idiot box that you can’t get your damn kids away from. Multi meaning more than one, like my ex-wife collection, and media meaning those very things you all love.
Now taken on their own they’re pretty harmless. But seriously folks I’m here today to talk about two magic words, multi and media.
That ‘ol floppy disk is a thing of the past – just like my first wife, and boy don’t get me started on her. Does your home computer suffer from floppy disk syndrome? Does it keep spitting out disk after disk demanding its next hit? Well allow me let you in on a little secret. The below is an excerpt from a trade show sales pitch of the technology as given by a snake-oil salesman who time travelled from 1892 to 1992: “Ladies and gentlemen step right up, step right up. Today! The CD-ROM was a milestone in both home computing and gaming technology. It felt like someone had taken the very essence of the distant future, plucked from the annals of time, and brought it into people’s homes. The CD-ROM opened the door to so much more storage that it became an almost overnight must-have item. When a game shipping on 10 floppy disks was considered insane, the prospect of 650 was revelatory. The CD-ROM brought with it 650 Megabytes of data, which was in every sense, a massive leap in storage capacity.
Prior to its introduction, storage on a floppy disk was capped at around 1 Megabyte of data, with many games at the time being stored on multiple disks due to this limitation. READ HISTORY BOOKThe introduction of the CD-ROM drive and Compact Disc into the world of home computing and video game consoles may feel like just another a step in the ongoing evolution of the medium, but it was a lot more profound than that. In the early to mid-1990s, when CD-ROM drives hit the market and PCs were starting to be referred to as ‘Multimedia PCs’, defining the adventure game genre became, well, a more difficult thing to do. When the mouse became a staple accessory that sat alongside the keyboard, the adventure genre was redefined again as ‘point-and-click’.
A few years later when King’s Quest was released it was redefined by being able to move a character around a screen and type out commands to interact with objects and solve puzzles. In the early 1980s the adventure genre was defined by reading and then entering text. And although this is a somewhat glib breakdown of the term, there is truth in there somewhere, especially when a gaming genre is defined by its very presentation – as it has always been with adventure games. It’s a way to categorise a product into a specific group, where it can sit alongside similar products and appeal to a consumer with as little confusion as possible. The term ‘genre’ has its roots firmly in marketing.
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