You've probably noticed from my posts here that I'm a little into CD-ROMs. What's up with that?
For me, the CD-ROM era is a really interesting period of artist-driven development. If you've been following @compactdiscinteractive you've seen that there's a lot of beautiful strange, wonderful things! They're not always good but there's so much that's interesting. There's a few reasons behind that, but for me there's two big things in particular.
Starting with Hypercard in the 80s and then Director in the 90s, suddenly there were some really good artist-focused development tools. One person, who wasn't a trained programmer, could suddenly make something cool and interactive on their own. There was a whole explosion of single-person interactive art on floppies that led to bigger, more ambitious stuff on CD.
The other one is just that no one had any idea what they were doing. In a good way! These days we have a pretty set conception of what a "video game" is, but back when "CD-ROM game" was a new thing, there weren't any written rules yet. You could do anything. Sometimes you got a weird mess! And sometimes you got fascinating things that would be way harder to pitch with any kind of budget now.
So it's all this wild experimental zone with lots of stuff to discover. I love diving into it and seeing what I can find. I always come way inspired.