Background
Released in 1988, the Genesis (known as the Mega Drive in most territories outside
of North America) was Sega's entry into the fourth generation of video game
consoles.[2] In the early 1990s, Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske helped make the
Genesis a success by cutting the price, developing games for the American market
with a new American team, continuing aggressive advertising campaigns, and selling
Sonic the Hedgehog with the Genesis as a pack-in game.[3]
By the early 1990s, compact discs (CDs) were making headway as a storage medium for
music and video games. NEC had been the first to use CD technology in a video game
console with their PC Engine CD-ROM² System add-on in October 1988 in Japan
(launched in North America as the TurboGrafx-CD the following year), which sold
80,000 units in six months.[4] That year, Nintendo announced a partnership with
Sony to develop its own CD-ROM peripheral for the SNES. Commodore International
released their CD-based CDTV multimedia system in early 1991, while the CD-i from
Philips arrived later that year.[5] According to Nick Thorpe of Retro Gamer, Sega
would have received criticism from investors and observers had it not developed a
CD-ROM game system.[6]
Development
Shortly after the release of the Genesis, Sega's Consumer Products Research and
Development Labs, led by manager Tomio Takami, were tasked with creating a CD-ROM
add-on. It was originally intended to equal the capabilities of the TurboGrafx-CD,
but with twice as much random-access memory (RAM).[7] In addition to relatively
short loading times, Takami's team planned to implement hardware scaling and
rotation similar to that of Sega's arcade games, which required a dedicated digital
signal processor.[7][8] A custom graphics chip would implement these features,
alongside an additional sound chip manufactured by Ricoh.[6] According to Kalinske,
Sega was ambitious about what CD-ROM technology would do for video games, with its
potential for "movie graphics", "rock and roll concert sound" and 3D animation.[6]
Because the Genesis' Motorola 68000 CPU was too slow to handle the Sega CD's new
graphical capabilities, an additional 68000 CPU was incorporated.[7] This second
CPU has a clock speed of 12.5 MHz, faster than the 7.67 MHz CPU in the Genesis.[6]
Responding to rumors that NEC planned a memory upgrade to bring the TurboGrafx-CD
RAM from 0.5 Mbit to between 2 and 4 Mbit, Sega increased the Sega CD's available
RAM from 1 Mbit to 6 Mbit.[7] This proved to be a technical challenge, since the
Sega CD's RAM access speed was initially too slow to run programs effectively, and
the developers had to focus on increasing the speed.[8] The estimated cost of the
device rose to US$370, but market research convinced Sega executives that consumers
would be willing to pay more for a state-of-the-art machine.[7] Sega partnered with
JVC, which had been working with Warner New Media to develop a CD player under the
CD+G standard.[4][9]
Sega of America was not informed of the project details until mid-1991. Despite
being provided with preliminary technical documents earlier in the year, the
American division was not given a functioning unit to test.[10] According to former
executive producer Michael Latham, "When you work at a multinational company, there
are things that go well and there are things that don't. They didn't want to send
us working Sega CD units. They wanted to send us dummies and no
