Advent Calendar 12: The Shiny Frisbee

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

Picture it: Phoenix, Arizona. 199... uh, 3, ish? It's been a while. As mentioned, my father did a lot of CAD design and sometimes worked at home, back in the days when the brontosaurus stampedes sometimes interfered with his morning commute, so we always had at least one up-to-date PC in the house. 

The big purchase that year was a tricked-out '486. For those of you who were not buying desktop PCs when you had to know and care what all the parts were, the CPU (and the motherboard it went on) was usually the single most costly piece, so you figured out your price range and picked that out first. Next up were the RAM and the hard drive. These days you don't need to worry too much about either unless you're building a server or a gaming computer, but back in the day it legitimately mattered. Less in my house, perhaps -- my father taught me how to field strip an ATX case when I was in grade school, followed by the long tedious process of whacking the OS with a hammer until it understood what you'd just done to the hardware, but a lot of people didn't upgrade their PC for funsies. 

The most exciting part of this new PC, however, was the "multimedia package". It came with a 17" SVGA monitor that displayed a whopping 1024 x 768 pixels, a resolution today achieved by my dirt cheap LG Rebel 4 phone. It came with a SoundBlaster 16, a sound card with wavetable and FM synthesis playback using a Yamaha YMF262, a chip which can now be purchased for under $2. And, most importantly, it came with a CD-ROM drive.

The idea of using audio media for data storage was not crazy. Computers made the jump from physical recordings like Jacquard loom punch cards and paper tapes to rearranging ferrous particles with magnets at about the same time as the music industry did, in the 1950s and '60s. Home microcomputers used cassette tapes for storage in the '80s. Floppies and hard drives are pretty much the same thing, except the signal is stored in concentric circles on a platter instead of in one long line down a strip of tape. The concept of CD-ROM was first demonstrated in 1984, and drives were on the market by 1986.

No, the crazy part was the idea that any normal person would ever need access to the sheer amount of random crap a CD-ROM could hold. The first drives were expensive bastards sold to the same kinds of educational institutions who bought LaserDiscs full of science to cram into the heads of impressionable children, and the first killer app for it was Microsoft Bookshelf. It was conceived of as a way to not just store millions of pages of text, but to augment that text with explanatory pictures, sounds, and video clips, and to make all of those things accessible at the click of a button, or at least a brief keyword search.

This is obviously not what happened. This is never what happens. Every time we invent something meant to advance the state of our species, the first thing we actually do with it is fuck around. We invented writing to keep accounting ledgers, and immediately used it for graffiti. We invented the printing press to spread spiritual enlightenment, and we used it to print pornography and bawdy shit like Chaucer. So obviously when we created a data format designed to collect and maintain the bulk of human knowledge in an easily-referenced format, somebody looked at it and went, "Holy shit -- do you know how many games we could fit on that?"

Up to this, video games had stayed small out of necessity. Cartridge games were constrained by the size of the ROM chips, which were relatively expensive. Atari 2600 games were around 2-4K; the largest SNES cart that I know of was the 1995 release Tales of Phantasia, which clocked in at 48 megabits (= 6 megabytes). A Commodore Datasette stored about 100K per 30 minutes of tape. Computer games could span several disks, but a single 3.5" diskette held at most 2.88Mb, and that format was relatively rare -- most were half that. A CD-ROM could hold 650 megabytes of (almost) whatever you wanted, and it would just be right there, ready for access, sitting in the drive like it lived there.

The bottleneck at this point was the machine reading the disc. Just because your media can hold 650Mb doesn't mean the computer can choke down all 650Mb at once. The transfer rate for a basic CD-ROM is 150Kb/s, which not coincidentally is also the throughput needed for MPEG-1 video; you can stream MPEG-1 video straight from a CD (which is what a VideoCD is), but you can't get anything else off the disc while you're doing that, and there's a limit to what you can stash in RAM. So most of the very early games for CD-ROM used the space for a few short video clips, and eighty bazillion "high-resolution" pictures instead.

Behold, the most famous of famous CD-ROM games, MYST. Originally released for the Mac in 1993, MYST almost single-handedly drove consumer adoption of the CD-ROM format. To hell with having a reference library in your desk drawer -- people wanted pretty pictures that you could click on until you got a reward, like a rat hammering on the food lever in a behavioral lab! Except instead of something useful like a food pellet, your reward was a new picture to click on. If the game was really pleased with you, you might get a short grainy video clip. The basic setup is one still used for a lot of mobile games today. So if you've ever mysteriously lost eight hours of your life playing June's Journey, you can thank Brøderbund for reminding everyone that point-and-click adventures existed.