Touring Central and Northern England on CD-i!

[MaximumRD]

Nice video from Seb aka HalfBlindGamer -I do miss that era, that time when every company was scrambling basically to make the most of the incredible optical media format, of course you had PCs that could be expanded with cd drives and speakers and MPEG cards, etc., all these attempts to harnessing the power of multimedia was really interesting. Of course not everyone could afford a big high end, whizbang multi media PC and then you had the other end where people were playing games on their consoles. I guess it’s really not too surprising that some companies would attempt to create a platform that married the two or at least  made an attempt to offer much of what the high-end multimedia offered while at the same time, letting you play a few games here and there. And really, when you consider some thing like the 3DO or the CD-i, they certainly stood out, to a lesser extent even commodores CDTV  Did the same thing because you would get titles that were everything from Atlases to encyclopedia's and medical guides all with of course narration, some video, clips and pictures and then of course you could get some games with FMV it was all rather exciting. Of course today we just use our PCs or really let’s face it iPads, and all kinds of main stream devices that pretty much are powerful enough to do all of those things in glorious HD quality but I certainly have a nostalgic attachment to that time when it was all new and everyone was trying to come out with the next big hit that harness to the power of multimedia.

 

Edited January 28, 2023 by MaximumRD

[Justin]

The presenter in this video reminds me of Carel Struycken.

Interesting video. The whole "Interactive Multimedia Entertainment System" idea of the early-mid '90s was showing us that video games could be esoteric gateways to exploring the world, travel, culinary delights, learning, and doing "so much more than Mario". It turns out however, people just wanted to play Mortal Kombat, and the interactive world wouldn't come on CD but would come online with the advent of the World Wide Web. (Microsoft Encarta giving way to Wikipedia is one example)

Cool to see this, thanks for sharing @MaximumRD. CD-i, 3DO, Jaguar, Amiga and so many others promised an interactive multimedia world that never quite came to be.