The Sega CD was originally designed to allow Sega to combat the Nintendo Play Station (An SNES attachment made by Sony that would allow the SNES to play games on CD s that was never released), but it ended up being on of Sega s biggest failures not financially, but it hurt consumers confidence of Sega as a brand.
Even before the Sega CD was released there were serious doubts about what at Sega that an add on like this could ever be a success. There were questions about if the technology for games on CD was really ready to be exploited, if an add on for the Sega Genesis could really sell and if there was really any reason for a company with a happy profitable market share should really risk making a new platform that would divide there research and development resources.
Two events settled the problems that faced Sega and there development team. The first was the public announcement that Nintendo was developing a CD attachment for there already technologically superior SNES the knowledge that there arch enemy was planning to make a quantum leap in technologically sent Sega into a frenzy, this made Sega open to learn from anyone who new anything about CD storage technologically one of the people they hired was Tom Zito. Tom Zito was the second reason that Sega pushed ahead with development of the Sega CD. Tom Zito was always a man who was thinking about the future in 1986 he started a company called Digital Pictures where he created two games using his own laser disk technology. His first game Dragons Lair was a Disney style animated adventure were you had to push the right buttons at the right time so your on screen person Dirk the Daring wouldn't die the second game he made was Sewer Shark a light gun game that had a lot of D-movie community college dropout actors that appeared in FMV stages that progressed the poorly written story. Dragons Lair saw a limited release in arcades, but even with the added interest brought on by the Disney animations it flopped because of its pore game play and repetitiveness. Sewer Shark was never released because Digital Pictures declared bankruptcy shortly after Dragons Lair flopped release. The knowledge that Sega was making a platform with the storage capacity to hold his games gave Tom Zito the perfect opportunity to "volunteer" his expertise to Sega in exchange for them to publish his games and fund more FMV( Full Motion Video) games.
Once Sega was convinced that the Sega CD was a good idea they started developing the actual hardware extension. The actual add on ended up being nothing but a CD player with no actual added power to the hardware, with the hardware ready and some FMV software already made the Sega CD launched in the United States on October 15 1992 its suggested retail price was $299 (Witch actually made it cost more then the Genesis witch cost $149 at the time of the Sega CD s launch). The Sega CD came with Tom Zitos game Sewer Shark, the choice of having this game come bundled with the Sega CD ended up being a disappointment to most consumers who generally agreed that Sewer Shark was at best a tech demo for what could be done with the CD formate.
The second big problem that faced Sega CD was that besides some FMV games that eventually lost there novelty once people were able to see that the games were horrible in mostly every way. Games like Night Trap, Ground Zero: Texas, Slam City and Cadillacs And Dinosaurs turned out to be huge disappointments that left most Sega buyers with a bad taste in there mouth about what Sega would let people put on there console.
On a final note the Sega CD ended up actually having two triple A titles Snatcher and Sonic CD, witch gave the console some creditability, but could never actually save the console from its eventual doom. In the end the the Sega CD dose deserve its place in history as the first time you could play CD based games on a home console.
