Post
When games jumped from tiny cartridges to shiny discs and suddenly had room for real video, voice acting, and a whole lot of bad ideas.
The shift from cartridges to CD-ROMs in the early-to-mid 90s was transformative. CDs held 650MB versus a cartridge's typical 8-16MB, unlocking full-motion video (FMV), voice acting, orchestral soundtracks, and pre-rendered cutscenes. But the explosion of storage space also led to a wave of terrible 'multimedia' games: interactive movies with minimal gameplay, encyclopedia-style edutainment titles, and FMV disasters where real actors performed in front of green screens. The good games that leveraged CD-ROM well (Myst, Final Fantasy VII, Resident Evil) were transformative. The bad ones aged like milk left in the sun.
Example
Night Trap (1992) on Sega CD was an FMV game where players watched real actors through security cameras. It was mediocre as a game but became infamous when Congress used it as evidence that video games were corrupting youth, leading to the creation of the ESRB rating system.
Why it matters
The CD-ROM transition was the first major media format shift in gaming and set the precedent for how storage capacity drives creative ambition. It also taught the industry that more space doesn't automatically mean better games; you still need good design.
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