Was it SDI or PCE CD port of It came from the desert the reason Cinemaware tanked?

[CCCP alert]

I am not 100% sure but still fairly sure NEC bought a stake in Cinemaware in exchange for the development of ICftD CD their machine and that massively ambitious cringeworthy crap broke them financially. Wikipedia is saying due to some last minute additions requested to SDI dev costs they went bankrupt and no mention of PCE CD ICftD (may not even mention NEC investment).

I am pretty sure I read something about PCE CD ICftD in a magazine from the early 90s. Not 100% sure though.

[dreadnought]

The Digital Antiquarian has, as usual, a pretty good write-up of that debacle: https://www.filfre.net/2016/12/a-tim...-1-cinemaware/

Seems they got tired of Commodore's ineptitude regarding CD-ROMs and so went out searching for new partners. That didn't work out well unfortunately...

[Amigajay]

Shame the facts like Atari released a CDROM drive for the ST, and DOTC was the 2nd cd-rom game coming out days after Manhunt are incorrect, kinda puts you off reading what other info they researched, certainly reads like a younger person has researched it and didn’t live through it.

Commodore weren’t in the position both financially and Amiga market wise size to release a CD drive earlier than 1990 when they first pushed the CDTV, yet the article keeps on saying Commodore were so slow, and still didn’t by such and such…

But back on topic, if true yes its sad they took a gamble and were purely driven by interactive games that they thought needed cd-rom to fully realise.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

DOTC was the 2nd cd-rom game coming out days after Manhunt are incorrect

I presume you mean Manhole, not Manhunt. Anyway, it's not that simple (unless you mean that PCE game, but I believe his angle is about computers). Seems he did research this quite well and there's a whole conversation about it in the comments. He usually makes revisions after something like that and since there isn't one it the subject is kind of hanging "in the air", meaning it could swing both ways, but it's quite possible he is correct after all.

As for the ST CD rom claim it seems like a genuine mistake, though again, he's usually being corrected on things like that in the comments since a larg chunk of his readership is oldtimers and people in the know, so i'm curious why nobody picked on that.

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I actually think maybe it was a blessing in disguise that they folded in 1991 and never got to make CD-ROM games. The truth is that most of the early ones were rubbish and I'm pretty sure they would jump on the bandwagon of digitized (ie terrible) gfx and minimal gameplay. As it is, their games are mostly very playable and have amazing pixel art, perhaps thanks to the floppy induced limitations, so I'm happy with what we got.

[Megalomaniac]

We've started here with the assumption that Cinemaware were making good money from their disk-based games before attempting CD-ROM titles. Is this accurate? Wings was only released for the Amiga back then (1 Meg only too, when most Amigas sold with only 512k), and that was a declining market in the US, not helped by piracy (they were threatening not to do any more Amiga games for that reason). The European market was bigger, and I suspect Mirrorsoft got a bigger cut of profit from those sales than Cinemaware did (and not having ST versions from ICFTD onwards may have impacted them there too?). The TV Sports games may not have travelled that well beyond the US market either. It was Mirrorsoft who attempted to save them after their initial bankruptcy - unfortunately Mirrorsoft themselves folded shortly afterwards due to the wider issues in Robert Maxwell's business which led him to take his life. NEC probably underestimated the cost of making a rounded CD-ROM epic.

I always hated the early CD-ROM games myself, and very few of them stand up well compared to more traditional games from the same era (and the acting is almost never a match for actual films or TV) - does anyone really prefer Rebel Assault to X-Wing, or 7th Guest to Day of the Tentacle? Cinemaware's Amiga games may not have been universally popular with those favouring traditional-style gameplay (Amiga Power was generally unimpressed, though the games were before their time), but they did generally have decent action scenes and some strategic / adventure elements, and generally got better over time.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I presume you mean Manhole, not Manhunt. Anyway, it's not that simple (unless you mean that PCE game, but I believe his angle is about computers).

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I actually think maybe it was a blessing in disguise that they folded in 1991 and never got to make CD-ROM games. The truth is that most of the early ones were rubbish and I'm pretty sure they would jump on the bandwagon of digitized (ie terrible) gfx and minimal gameplay. As it is, their games are mostly very playable and have amazing pixel art, perhaps thanks to the floppy induced limitations, so I'm happy with what we got.

Yeah typo!
After typing my reply earlier i did think maybe it was from a computer POV.

Interesting viewpoint, of course we will never know, but from what we do know of the PCE CD version that was indeed the way they were heading, and even stated they would reuse the footage on other formats, so i concur that it’s a shame they folded, but i don’t feel like we missed out massively on anything.

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

We've started here with the assumption that Cinemaware were making good money from their disk-based games before attempting CD-ROM titles.

I always hated the early CD-ROM games myself, and very few of them stand up well compared to more traditional games from the same era (and the acting is almost never a match for actual films or TV) - does anyone really prefer Rebel Assault to X-Wing, or 7th Guest to Day of the Tentacle? Cinemaware's Amiga games may not have been universally popular with those favouring traditional-style gameplay (Amiga Power was generally unimpressed, though the games were before their time), but they did generally have decent action scenes and some strategic / adventure elements, and generally got better over time.

Who knows what money they were making, but they made a name for themselves and published on lots of formats and sold part of the business to NEC, so i don’t think they were doing too badly!

Wasn’t just the early CD-ROM games, right upto 96-97 there was plenty of ‘FMV’ style games, a good 8-9 years after the first CD console games. But i agree most were poop, and were good for a play through once for the visual thrill never to be played again!

[CCCP alert]

lost all the browsing history on my old PC but I did find a few interesting things before, one was an issue of ACE magazine that had a feature on their new more sophisticated dev tools which is why Desert is their most complex/open ended interactive game and is a miracle it runs from three low density disks of about 3mb in total. Wings has 1 good/1 mediocre/1 shit mini game and lots of guff padding it out.

Most Amiga games were shit, the first 5-6 Psygnosis titles made you question why the 64 is packed away and the ST/Amiga on the desk in 1986, DotC is gold standard for 1986. one of only 2 A1000 games not shit compared to the C64 owners experience to be brutally honest.