(re: re: Was KQ5 one of the first CD games? )
> I thought the first CD game was Myst but I could be
> mistaken. (Actually now that I write that, I’m starting
> to think it may have been the 7th Guest.)
In fact, you’ve got to differentiate between games that were released on CD-ROM (but were also released on floppy disks), games that had an enhanced CD-ROM version (but were also released on floppy disks), and games that were specifically created for the CD-ROM, and were never released on floppy disks.
In 1990 and 1991, some game collections were released on CD-ROM (can’t remember any specific titles right now), but the games were the same as the floppy disk versions. I even have a CD-ROM full of shareware programs (and games!) that was released in 1987 I think. The “x1”, 150 KB/s speed standard didn’t even exist at that time, that is, you could find CD-ROM drives that were *slower* than that!
King’s Quest 5 was definitely one of the very first games to take advantage of the CD-ROM capacity (although it only occupied 1/6 of the total space available), if not the first (maybe Ken can confirm this). Loom CD was also released very early.
As for games specifically written for the CD-ROM medium, 7th Guest is indeed one of the very first (probably with Myst on the Macintosh).
BTW, Ken, if you read this, I remember seeing in a local (French) computer magazine back in 1990 that the CD-ROM version of King’s Quest 5 would ship on 2 CD-ROMs. After buying the commercial release, and seeing that it only took about 100MB on one CD-ROM, I have always assumed that Sierra first considered using the CD-DA (audio) capacity of the CD-ROMs to deliver the voices (as LucasArts did for Loom), before switching to a compressed audio file on the CD-ROM, played by Sound Blasters and the like. Any rememberance of this?
Vincent.