CD-ROM THE EARLY YEARS

The introduction of the ‘silver disc’, for an industry where many publishers were scared to even consider printing a game on two separate floppy disks, can truly be considered a revolution. Developers found themselves, from having to work with sizes of around 10-20MBs, to having almost 60 times that. But, it was a revolution that no one really seemed to be quite prepared for. Suddenly the problem became: what should be done with all that extra space? Computers and consoles did not really jump in processing power, they just had more ‘space’ to use.

In the early Nineties, the solution seemed pretty clear: make the player interact with digitised movie sequences and images. Indeed, interactive movies soon set themselves apart as the new genre of the future, with CD-ROMs gradually being adopted as the standard media by consoles like the Philips CD-i and the ‘media system’ Commodore CDTV. Some of the very early experiments in interactive movies actually came from the United Kingdom, where a small team, On-Line Entertainment, was the first to develop a system purposefully made to easily create FMV games. But where did the company come from?

CRL (Computer Rentals Limited) was an English software developer and publisher, which began as an actual computer renting company, hence the name. CRL was founded in the early Eighties by then 18-year-old Clement