[jsz0]

As corny as they seem now the early FMV CD-ROM games felt like a gigantic leap forward at the time. Being able to interact with a photorealistic environment was a completely new experience. Being too ignorant at the time to understood how they worked it seemed like pure magic. Of course they were nothing but a novelty in retrospect but the illusion was very real at the time.

[Fomite]

This. I remember playing a Sherlock Holmes CD-ROM game with tiny little clips of FMV, and feeling like this was the future.

[agent86]

How about Weezer's "Buddy Holly" music video on the Windows 95 CD? Sometimes when I see articles about viral videos and views I wonder where that video would rank if we had the capability to track its plays.

[bitwize]

Recently I had a flashback to a similar video on one of the MSDN CDs called "Studs from Microsoft". Studs, for those who weren't in the USA at the time, was a sort of dating game show in which two improbably attractive men each dated the same three improbably attractive women. The men are then quizzed on what the women thought of their dates and of the men, with the potential grand prize being a dream date with your preferred girl of the three. But that wasn't the point, the real entertainment value was all the ribald sexual talk in the questions and answers.

Studs from Microsoft was a parody of this format, with the "studs" replaced by Microsoft programming nerds, from Seattle area sketch comedy show Almost Live!. It is also notable for featuring a pre-Science-Guy Bill Nye.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=broFpsLHehc

[latentsea]

What was the line at the end of that? "Did you try the fish?" or something like that right? Man, brings back some memories.

[bobthepanda]

I mean, more recently there was that whole fiasco where Apple downloaded a new U2 song onto everybody's iPhones and made its users very angry.

[chihuahua]

The entire album "Songs of Innocence" was forced onto everyone's iPhone, whether they wanted it or not. Apple thought they were doing everyone a favor. When some people deleted it from their iPhones, it came back on its own.

"You're going to listen to this U2 album, and you're going to like it!" -- Tim Apple

[pocketarc]

Hard to believe it, but that was over a decade ago already.

[qingcharles]

I logged into my old Apple account for the first time since 2013 yesterday and I was like "Why do I have a U2 album?" and then I was like "Ohhh..."

[esaym]

Ha, I was going to say that. I think it was like 1992 and we got a packard bell for Christmas and it came with a stack of shareware CDs. 2mhz and 2MB of ram I believe. There was some kind of Sherlock Holmes CD-ROM point 'n click type game that had a bunch of FMVs. The whole family would gather around (sometimes the neighbors included) and we'd all oodle over the "graphics".

[ido]

Definitely not 2Mhz, maybe 20 or 25Mhz? 33mhz was also common in that time frame. Even the original PC from 1981 ran at 4.77mhz.

[pocketarc]

I'm assuming it's Sherlock Holmes and the case of the rose tattoo! What a brilliant game.

Believe it or not, thanks to ScummVM being in the iOS/iPad OS App Store now, I have actually played that game on my iPad. You'd be amazed at how well it's held up. It looks really good on an iPad, and the point and click nature of it fits touchscreens perfectly.

[duxup]

I used to buy so many of those cheap CD-ROM animation / video / pics collection disks.

They were fun to run through.

[amyjess]

When I was a kid, I remember being super fascinated by the Power Rangers game on Sega CD and played what little of it I could on the demo consoles at Blockbuster and other places.

I had all the other major consoles at the time except the Sega CD so I never got to own it at home, but the idea of playing through an actual episode of Power Rangers while pressing buttons that correspond to the actions taken by the actual characters just felt so cool. All the other Power Rangers games were either fighting games or belt-scroll beat-'em-ups, but this one let me play through an actual episode!

...and then I emulated it as an adult and realized it was just a pile of QTEs with no real game and that the video quality was abject dogshit. But the beat-'em-ups still hold up, to the point where they're making a new one now.

[will1am]

The ability to include real video footage in game

[sillywalk]

I remember being awed at Under A Killing Moon on 4(!) CDs. Great game.

[myself248]

I scored a cheap 7-disc changer at university surplus, specifically for that game. It was only a 2x drive behind the changer, and I needed to source a SCSI controller card and cable, but I got it all going and suddenly I had LUNs galore!

D: disc1, E: disc2, F: disc3, G: disc4, H:empty I:empty: J:empty.

The game was kind enough to let you specify different drives for the discs rather than assuming a single swapping situation, though it would check them all at launch time, which was quite a slow affair. But once it was going, it was great; as you moved between regions in the game, the drive would simply change discs and spin up the new one and away you went.

ISTR they did a certain amount of duplication, some overlap between regions would be on both discs, so it wouldn't require swapping constantly if you were right on a border. But at some points it would flip back and forth, and the changer made all the difference.

[sillywalk]

Lucky score!

I think you're right that some of the data was duplicated. I can't remember if any other multi-cd games allowed assigning different drive letters to different discs. Also works with DOSbox

[JohnClark1337]

Deadly Tide on Windows 95 was amazing. I still consider it to be one of the best rail-shooters ever made.

[lagniappe]

Why did this comment require vouching?

[amyjess]

I'm going to guess the poster was banned for something a while back. When you're banned on HN, you aren't locked out of posting, but everything you post appears as dead by default and requires someone to vouch it.

dang has talked about this before, but there are a number of users who were rightfully banned, go on to post nothing but healthy, constructive comments that almost always get vouched, and then immediately turn abusive again when they're unbanned. So the current moderation philosophy is to leave them banned and let users vouch their comments, which works out better for everyone.

[duxup]

Something automatic due to post history maybe?