There’s something darkly hilarious about spending £269 on a plastic mushroom that plugged into your Mega Drive, only to watch it gather dust next to a stack of games that barely justified the cardboard they were printed on. The Sega CD—or Mega-CD if you’re being proper about it—launched into my living room with all the grace of a Space Shuttle mission planned by committee. Big promises. Bigger price tag. And honestly? Most of the library was absolute tosh.
But here’s the thing about expensive mistakes that aren’t quite mistakes—sometimes they house genuine brilliance between all the shovelware and full-motion video experiments that aged like milk in summer. I kept that mushroom plugged in for years, and there were genuinely brilliant moments when I’d slide a disc into that front-loading tray and think, “Right, *this* is why I bought this ridiculous thing.”
Sonic CD was the obvious poster child, wasn’t it? Everyone bangs on about it now like it was some lost masterpiece, and you know what? They’re not wrong. The time travel mechanic felt properly mental in 1993—past, present, future versions of each level, all with different music tracks that somehow made perfect sense. That opening animation with Sonic running across those geometric landscapes while “Sonic Boom” played… it felt like Saturday morning cartoons had been injected with proper budget and ambition. The Japanese soundtrack was obviously superior (fight me), and creating a good future by destroying robot generators in the past was the kind of temporal mechanics that made my teenage brain feel very clever indeed.
Snatcher, though. Christ, Snatcher. Hideo Kojima before anyone knew who Hideo Kojima was, wrapped up in a cyberpunk detective story that borrowed heavily from Blade Runner and somehow made that borrowing feel like a love letter rather than theft. The voice acting was surprisingly decent for the era—proper English dubbing that didn’t make you wince every third line. Playing it felt like being inside a proper science fiction novel, complete with that Kojima trademark of making you care about characters you’d only just met before putting them in absolutely horrible situations. The Light Gun sequences were brilliant too, even if my Menacer looked like something you’d use to hunt space dinosaurs rather than cyborgs.
Then there was Lunar: The Silver Star, which taught me that JRPGs could have proper personality instead of just endless grinding and silent protagonists. Working Designs’ localization was cheeky in all the right ways—characters who actually talked like people rather than fantasy novel exposition dumps. The animated cutscenes felt like having a Studio Ghibli film broken up by gameplay segments, and the voice acting made every major story beat land with actual emotional weight. Plus, it came in one of those big cardboard boxes with an actual cloth map and a soundtrack CD, making it feel like you’d bought something genuinely special rather than just another plastic case.
Road Rash was already brilliant on the Mega Drive, but the CD version added a soundtrack that turned high-speed motorcycle violence into something approaching art. Soundgarden, Hammerhead, Monster Magnet—proper grunge and metal that made every race feel like the opening scene of a particularly good action film. Kicking rival bikers off their machines while “Rusty Cage” thundered through the speakers created this perfect synthesis of 90s rebellion and digital mayhem. The full-motion video sequences between races were wonderfully cheesy too, all leather jackets and attitude that somehow enhanced rather than interrupted the experience.
Ecco the Dolphin CD was where things got genuinely weird. The original Mega Drive version was already this strange, almost meditative experience about a dolphin exploring underwater mazes and communicating through sonar. But the CD version added Spencer Nilsen’s ambient soundtrack that transformed every swimming session into something approaching transcendental. Those deep, whale-song compositions mixed with synthesized atmospherics made the ocean feel properly alien and vast. It was like playing through a nature documentary scored by Vangelis, assuming Vangelis had ever been asked to soundtrack dolphin-based puzzle solving.
Night Trap gets mentioned in every Sega CD retrospective, usually followed by some hand-wringing about full-motion video games and moral panic. But stripping away the controversy, it was actually quite clever—a real-time surveillance game where you had to monitor multiple camera feeds and trigger traps to protect teenagers from vampires. The acting was wonderfully hammy B-movie stuff, and the challenge of managing multiple video streams while waiting for specific visual cues created this unique tension that regular games couldn’t replicate. Was it good? Depends how you define good. Was it memorable? Absolutely.
The real tragedy of the Sega CD wasn’t the shovelware—every console has shovelware. It was that the genuinely brilliant games got lost in the noise of Sega’s marketing department trying to sell “full-motion video” as the future of gaming. FMV wasn’t the point. Enhanced audio was the point. CD-quality soundtracks were the point. Proper voice acting and massive storage capacity for actual content rather than compressed sprites—that was the point.
I still fire up that mushroom occasionally, usually late at night when the house is quiet and the CRT is warmed up just right. The mechanical whirr of the CD tray sliding in and out, the slight pause before the disc spins up, that particular quality of CD-DA audio coming through composite cables—it all adds up to something you can’t quite replicate with emulation, no matter how accurate the core.
Was the Sega CD worth £269 in 1993 money? Probably not for most people. But for those of us who kept the faith, who dug past the digital comics and interactive movies to find the genuine gems buried in that library, it offered experiences that felt genuinely futuristic. Gaming with proper orchestral soundtracks. Adventures with full voice acting. RPGs that came with cloth maps and soundtrack CDs like they were special editions by default.
The add-on didn’t save Sega’s fortunes, but it housed some genuine classics that still hold up today. Sometimes the best justification for expensive gaming purchases isn’t rational—it’s the memory of sliding Sonic CD into that front loader for the first time and realizing that yeah, sometimes the future actually lives up to the hype. Even if it takes a few years to prove it.
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