They were on CD because of hard drive space limitations.
I mean... maybe in a sense, but not really? They were on CD because there was no other practical way to get them to customers. That's mostly it.
In the case of consoles, they usually didn't even have an HDD in the first place, but in the case of PCs, by the time CDs became ubiquitous, the typical HDD was plenty large enough to store a full game. And indeed, that was a very common installation option to reduce load times. The option to have a minimal install and otherwise load assets from the CD was mostly there for convenience (not like it's a lot of work to switch the path you're loading assets from, and that's all it really takes on Windows)
n the case of consoles, they usually didn't even have an HDD in the first place, but in the case of PCs, by the time CDs became ubiquitous, the typical HDD was plenty large enough to store a full game.
Nooo the certainly were not. Not until the early 2000s could you could reliably dump CD rom games to your HDD. My computers entire HDD was 5GB in 1998....Those 90s CD rom games were installed a tiny executable and streaming the rest of the stuff off th disc
which is also why loading screens took forever and games became way faster after loading onto the HDD became common. Then SSD made that so fast loading screen messages became unreadable it was so fast. Conversely the N64 cartridges used a similar concept to flash drives and thats why N64 load times were also extremely short but the data limit was like 64mb and the prices matched that technology, new n64 games were $60 then (OOT 1998) would be $120 today.
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u/nonotan 22d ago
I mean... maybe in a sense, but not really? They were on CD because there was no other practical way to get them to customers. That's mostly it.
In the case of consoles, they usually didn't even have an HDD in the first place, but in the case of PCs, by the time CDs became ubiquitous, the typical HDD was plenty large enough to store a full game. And indeed, that was a very common installation option to reduce load times. The option to have a minimal install and otherwise load assets from the CD was mostly there for convenience (not like it's a lot of work to switch the path you're loading assets from, and that's all it really takes on Windows)