In 1992 a PC game fit on a handful of floppy disks. By 1996, shipping a game without a CD-ROM was unthinkable. The decade's fastest technology shift rewired what games looked like, sounded like, and how much they cost to make.

650 megabytes of possibility

The first beneficiaries were adventures and RPGs: full voice acting (King's Quest VI's theatrical cast), pre-rendered cutscenes (Wing Commander III's Hollywood stars), and the entire encyclopedia-style output of Myst. FMV became a craze - and a cautionary tale.

Hardware that stumbled

The famous double-speed CD drives stuttered through video, and sound cards were still a purchase decision. Yet by 1995 the CD-ROM drive became standard equipment, and with it came console-sized budgets and studios.

What it left behind

The CD era created both the modern big-budget game and the mid-tier studio that could afford to be weird. When digital distribution finally killed the disc, it quietly killed the last excuse for games to be small. Old Games News owes its subject matter to those shiny discs - and to the drives that spun them.