Collection essentials #288: Sega CD

By the early ‘90s, it was clear that CDs were destined to replace cartridges as the standard for how video games were sold. Technology was improving rapidly, but when this truth became evident, it was years before things had progressed enough for CDs to properly replace cartridges as the standard. Nevertheless, companies were eager to stay ahead of the curve with technology. At first, rather than release consoles that played games stored on CDs, companies instead developed add-ons for their cartridge-playing consoles that were sold separately and could play games specifically developed for them. One competitor to Nintendo and Sega back then was the Turbografx-16 (also known as the PC Engine in Japan) developed by NEC, who collaborated with developer Hudson Soft. They were the first company to release an add-on for playing CD games, which came out in the late ‘80s. (I have in the past owned Turbografx consoles but have chosen not to keep them in my collection so I won’t be covering them.) Nintendo in the early ‘90s planned on making a CD add-on for the SNES, though eventually those plans were scrapped. But Sega, wanting to stay competitive, also came up with a CD add-on for their Genesis, and did manage to get it released. 

What were the benefits of having games on a CD? There were a few. The biggest was probably the fact that CDs were simply able to store a lot more data. The amount of space on cartridges was pretty limited and that sometimes got in the way of games being as big or great as they could have been. CDs allowed for far better audio quality, about as good as you could expect to hear on a music CD, which of course wasn’t terribly different from listening to someone playing music right in front of you. CDs also wound up being cheaper to produce, though I’m not totally sure if that was already the case when the Sega CD first launched. There were drawbacks to using CDs too, though. It took games more time to load data from the CD, routinely requiring gamers to wait around for the game to start or continue a lot more than they ever did. Saving your game was also made a little more tricky, because you couldn’t save your progress directly to the game CD. In Sega CD’s case, the system itself had some memory that could hold some of your save data, and a “CD backup RAM cart” was sold separately for those who needed more storage.

Another thing CDs could do was “full motion video”. With the Sega CD, developers could put real-life footage in their video games. The quality had to be reduced quite a bit from what you’d see on regular TV channels, with the video playing in a small window and noticeably more grainy. There were various “FMV games” made for the Sega CD which utilized a lot of these video clips. These included the famous controversial game “Night Trap” which involved switching between a series of surveillance cameras. Sega really thought those games would carry a lot of appeal, and they were often front and center in marketing for the Sega CD.

No “add-on” like this was ever hugely successful even though several companies tried it. The Sega CD was basically a whole game console (it even used its own separate power cord), only it required you to already have a Sega Genesis to even run it, so it was a pretty heavy investment. And it came out in the middle of the Sega Genesis’s lifespan, so Sega was still fully supporting that console and making many regular cartridge games for it, so the Sega CD kind of came off as a curious side piece for rich kids or something. FMV games turned out to not be the future of gaming after all and failed to attract a wide audience, which probably was because those games generally just weren’t very good. The Sega CD hardware did provide a noticeable improvement, but it wasn’t so drastic as to make the average gamer clamor for it. It managed to review well with critics and sell over 2 million units, which may not be so bad considering the cost of getting one, but that’s well under 10% of how many Genesis consoles were sold. Because of how things went for Sega going forward (which I’m not getting into here), and because of a certain hyperbolic critical review from an extremely popular internet personality in the 2000s, the Sega CD’s reputation in hindsight is probably more negative than it should be. It does have a good number of quality games that do enjoy the perks provided by the CD format. Its library is still worth a look in modern times.

As for my own history with the Sega CD, I was completely unaware of it growing up in the ‘90s. I was too young to remember when it was on the market, and nobody I knew had one growing up. I don’t remember when I first learned of its existence, but it would have been soon after my family got the internet at home at the latest. I wound up getting my own in the early 2010s, as my cousin’s husband found out that I like to collect old video game stuff and decided to donate his old childhood games and consoles to me. The Sega CD unit shown in the photos is the very same one that he gave me.

There aren’t going to be a whole lot of Sega CD essentials for me, but I do treasure the ones that I have. Stay tuned to read more about them in the days ahead.