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This actually ended up being the only means by which games were released for the LaserActive: owners had to purchase both PACs to experience the entirety of the system’s library, and no game was ever released that did not require either one.Ī full ten years after Dragon’s Lair set arcades on fire, and with CD-based machines from NEC, Sega and Amiga on the horizon, Pioneer decided to step into the gaming market by leveraging its homegrown media format. Each PAC also had its own exclusive titles released on LaserDisc which used the unique hardware for playing games.
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These PACs costed an extra $600, and could take in both cartridges from those systems as well as override the disc drive to read discs from those respective CD add-ons. The company released a variety of expansion modules for the LaserActive called PACs, two of which allowing users to play Sega Genesis/Sega CD and TurboGrafx-16/Super CD games, respectively.
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It decided that, instead of funneling funds into original software development as a way of pump-priming developer interest in the hardware, the best course of action would be to piggyback on its aforementioned two biggest competitors in the CD console market. Pioneer seemed to realize its inadequacy on these fronts. The LaserActive launched for a dizzying $970 ($1536 when adjusted for inflation) for the base unit alone, keeping it out of most consumers’ budgets. This made it difficult to justify picking up the system instead of a cheaper alternative, such as a TurboGrafx-CD or Sega CD. Video quality was not even appreciably different than what was being done with encoding on CDs at the time the capacity of a LaserDisc was approximately 540 megabytes, as opposed to the roughly 700 of CDs. As with many disc-based systems at the time, it was mainly used for video with little interactivity.
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The LaserActive was released in 1994, a gigantic machine sporting little more than the barebones video-playing hardware in all LaserDisc players, aside from a few auxiliary features. Pioneer wanted to further promote the gaming potential of its now decades-old storage medium, and release a console which would use it as a unique selling point. The ability to use recorded video in games was a tantalizing prospect in the early ’80s, regardless of practicality. LaserDisc was able to store higher-quality video than VHS tapes, even though they essentially functioned like records for video. In particular, some famous and influential titles such as Dragon’s Lair and Road Avenger were made for arcades using LaserDisc to store their data, something that would have been nigh-impossible and prohibitively expensive on other storage media of the time. This format was used mainly for video, but there were several attempts to use it for games. Before CDs took hold as the dominant format, a predecessor managed to carve out a niche for itself: LaserDisc. When it was introduced, optical media offered a lot of advantages over cartridges and floppy disks: it was compact, cheap and able to hold a lot of data. The Pioneer LaserActive learned this the hard way. I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: Software trumps hardware every time. One such competitor, Pioneer, attempted to leverage an obscure medium while piggybacking on its more successful competitors to secure victory, but never obtained any compelling software. The dawn of optical media was a perilous point in games hardware history, with several platform creators rushing to take advantage of the new technology before the big players – Nintendo and Sega – could do it first. One of the biggest mistakes a console maker can make is putting a technological gimmick before the hardware itself.