8 ms·

Was it Quake? I used to listen to that game CD in my CD player at work, back in the late '90s.

• sumtechguy 3y ago
  Many games of that era have this. Usually the first track was the data, everything after was just normal cd audio data. I noticed it with most of my tg16 cd games and a few ps games. Once ogg and mp3 became a thing that sort of went away. Instead of 10-15 tracks you could have several hundred in the same space with similar quality in audio.
  • masklinn 3y ago
    > Once ogg and mp3 became a thing that sort of went away. I'd assume the issue was rather the game needing the space: the first few CD game generations took 50, 100, 200MB on the disc, so putting the OST in CD format was a nice easter egg. Note that games didn't generally put all sounds as CD tracks, just the actual music. Once your game starts filling the CD, to say nothing of needing multiple CDs worth of storage, having the OST included is not an option anymore.
    • edmccard 3y ago
      >so putting the OST in CD format was a nice easter egg. It wasn't an easter egg; it was how the games accessed and played the in-game music (and digitized speech when that was a new, exciting thing). There would be one huge data track and then dozens of small audio tracks. If the game did take multiple CDs, then either (a) you installed all the discs but all the audio was on the CD that had to be in the drive for the game to play or (b) each CD had the audio needed for the levels that were on that disc (I think that scenario was more common on PS1 games, but I could be mis-remembering)
      • masklinn 3y ago
        > It wasn't an easter egg; it was how the games accessed and played the in-game music Except they never had to do that, even before the MPs, they could always have stored the audio data as regular files on the disk image. Using CDDA just makes things more complicated as you need to reaccess the raw media instead of just reading the data from the filesystem.
        • corey_moncure 3y ago
          In those days CD drives could output the audio as analog or digital signals separately from the data bus, using a cable that connected directly to the sound card for zero-overhead music. Commodity CD drives on the PC go back to about 1992 and playing CD audio would have been prohibitive overhead for contemporary CPUs
          • wolpoli 3y ago
            It was quite surprising for me when I found music from the CD drive kept playing after I shut down Windows 95.
  • Ekaros 3y ago
    It really wasn't so much ogg and mp3. But the fact that systems got powerful enough to run both games alone rather complex task and also decode the music. We often forget just how slow systems in early nineties were.
• projektfu 3y ago
  Quake 2 was beautiful set to Orbital's In Sides.
  • beebeepka 3y ago
    What do you mean? Oh, listening to In Sides while shooting strogg? Maybe not a bad match. I don't think I can stomach this album anymore, though. I shouldn't have listened to it as much as I did back then.
    • projektfu 3y ago
      Yeah, it had this amazing habit of reaching the transition in "Adnan's' right as you came into a large open space, things like that. Memory is a little rusty from 1997 but I preferred it to the Reznor tracks, despite being a big NIN fan.
• bcx5k15 3y ago
  Command and Conquer did it too, if I recall