WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia

Publisher: Compton's NewMedia Developer: Compton's NewMedia Released: 1994

This is another of the handful of reference media that was released for the Sega CD (I already covered Animals in a previous installment of the series).

Anyone who was in school back in the 90s likely remembers discs like this. Back in the early days of multimedia – before the internet was so lightning fast and accessible – most school libraries had at least one copy of Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia (or something similar) on CD-ROM. You remember: this was when CD-ROMs came in little, plastic, cartridge-like shuttles.

The advantage these discs had over a traditional, paper encyclopedia was that they could include sound and video, as well as a searchable database that was much faster than finding the proper volume of the book set and searching the contents for your desired subject.

It's kind of amazing how recently encyclopedias on CD-ROM were actually state of the art technology. Nowadays with services like wikipedia and youtube, as well as thousands of other sites dedicated to just about any subject you can think about a simple Google search away, stuff like Compton's feels downright archaic. But man, this was the future back in the day.

So what the heck is this doing on a game system? Well, as I've mentioned before: multimedia game systems were in a weird space back in the mid-90s. There was this desire to justify the hardware by proving that it could do more than just play games – that it could be a productive part of family's lives. The Sega CD, 3DO, CD-i, etc all had products like this. Much like my dad justified an NES back in the day by telling himself it was a great way for us to practice our hand-eye coordination, I'm sure publishers of the 90s were hoping parents would use these discs to justify an even more expensive purchase.

In fact, Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia was one of the pack-in discs for JVC's X'Eye, which was a licensed Genesis/Sega CD hybrid console. The disc was also released as a standalone product, but I can't imagine it was in very large numbers.

So how useful is this thing. Honestly, I can't imagine using it for any serious research on any subject. The database seems pretty limited, the articles on each subject are ridiculously short, and most of the “videos” included are slideshows of still images with a bit of commentary over them. Not to mention the size and resolution is so small it's hard to tell what you're looking at.

Even if the information on offer wasn't woefully lacking, the user interface is awful as well. A slow moving cursor and a tiny on-screen keyboard coupled with a few buttons scattered along the bottom and side of the screen are the only means of navigating the database.

Multimedia encyclopedias were a good idea for their time, but they should never have appeared on game consoles.