THE 16-BITS SYSTEMS

PAGE 3

6.PHILLIPS CD-i

More than just a gaming console, the CD-i wanted to be a new interactive standard. Developed by Sony, Matsushita and Phillips, the machine is marketed in Europe and the United States in 1992. First home console featuring a CD player, it can play audio discs, movies, but obviously also video games... Combining these possibilities seemed a great asset to its designers, in order to come and dominate the home systems market. Unfortunately, this was not the case. 

Even if it was endowed with quite decent specifications (16 Bits 68000 CPU @15.5 MHz, CD -Rom media, 32,768 displayable colors, 8 Stereo Sound Channels, multiple devices...) CD-I had proved to be a poor game console, as it never proposed good games. We hardly remember the shooting game Mad Dog Mac Cree, the deceiving version of Lemmings, Dragon's Lair, Space Ace or the pretty pathetic Zelda games... Nothing revolutionary, however, unlike the announcing effects made ​​by its designers could have had people think. No game worthy of the name would mark the history of the machine, which painfully reached a half-million copies sold. A performance already remarkable, due in large part to the expertise in marketing of the big names -as Philips- involved. In fact, $700 for a fake videogame promising no great game after its release, it had to be done... The CD-i stays in video game history as the first casual-player trap of all times.

The 16-bit era was one of the most exciting periods in the history of video games. Rivalries and technological innovations, emergence of iconic characters, it was also the beginning of some legendary sagas in gaming history... And yet, we're only talking about home consoles: in arcades, war rages between great firms and their overpowering hardwares: SNK and its MVS battles against Capcom and its CPS, Taito Type X fights against Irem's M75, M92 and others; but there's also Sega, Namco, Midway, and so on ... Hey, and let's not forget the first handheld systems: In the wake of Game Boy came the Game Gear, the Lynx and the PC Engine GT... In the early 90s, the videogame scene really begins to develop and democratize at home. This is the pre-Playstation period, when publishers struggled to provide quality titles, and developers had to offer powerful and affordable consoles. Golden Age of quality video games -if there's any- the era of 16-bit systems will remain forever in the hearts of many players. Forgotten when came the 32-bit systems, Playstation and Saturn in mind, our good old 16-bits slept in the attic for a few years... then later regained numerous televisions of nostalgic Retro Gamers and 2-D lovers. Will these famous 32-bits, first  real three-dimensional consoles make the same one day? Today, in 2011, does the PlayStation aged as well as the Neo Geo or the Super Nintendo ...? Well, that's not so sure.