Farewell to the module

Summary

For more than twenty years, games were distributed on cartridges. When CD-ROMs emerged as storage media in the early 90s, almost all major console manufacturers adopted them: CDs were cheaper to produce than cartridges and offered more than ten times the storage capacity.

Almost all new CD consoles fail. The Sega CD is not a big success, the CD32 goes down together with the manufacturer Commodore, the CD versions of the PC Engine remain niche products, the Neo Geo CD is notoriously slow. Atari’s Jaguar CD is released when the Jaguar has already flopped and proves to be extremely prone to error. Nintendo stays with modules in the N64, and even the 64DD disk extension does not use CD-ROMs, but only magnetic disks. Sega loses with Saturn against the new competitor Sony, who is the only manufacturer with his PlayStation right away with CD-ROMs worldwide success.

Modules continue to exist after that, but only for mobile consoles.