The internet wasn’t a great CD replacement for most people until well after the DVD had already supplanted it.
The internet wasn’t a great CD replacement for most people until well after the DVD had already supplanted it.
For applications and games, CD-ROMs would dominate the whole decade (and well into the mid 2000s really). But this kind of multimedia CD-ROM, which had content for the sake of content, definitely peaked earlier.
1994 was still solidly in the floppy era, and getting a CD-ROM was huge, even larger than some hard drives at the time.
If you had a CD-ROM drive in 1994, you were king.
"Peak of new people having access to their first cdrom drive"... hmm.
"Peak of this new thing totally changing the game, even if it gets more popular later, because it's mundane by the time that happens."?
"Peak of breathless press releases about MuLtImEdIa Cd-RoM"... That's probably it.
CD-ROM drives first started not being put in Mac laptops in 2008, so the peak "units sold" would have been somewhere in the early 2000s. But by then Internet speeds were fast enough and other methods existed, so they were waning in popularity/excitement.
Edit: I also remember that this computer came with a FMV game on CD. The gameplay and story were absolutely terrible, but the FMV sequences themselves were quite well done.
In 1994, home computers were getting more much popular, thanks in large part to the Eternal September having already begun and the proliferation of other national dialup services. People were finding interesting things with these new-to-them (expensive!) computers offline because even though dial-up was a prime reason they bought a computer to begin with, it very slow and was often still metered.
And by 1994, approximately every new big-box desktop computer came equipped with a CD-ROM drive. IDE CD-ROMs became well-entrenched around that time (which reduced costs by eliminating competing proprietary buses), and CD-ROMs held what was still a seemingly monumental amount of data. So they often used CD-ROMs to do much of their offline stuff.
Things like the Saturn, Dreamcast, PSX, and CD-i certainly helped move a non-trivial share of CD-ROM media, but the total number of these (pricey!) games sold is probably dwarfed by the ridiculous number of cheap shovelware PC releases. (And most people weren't reading like PSX discs in a PC -- piracy was a thing, but it required hardware hacking to work smoothly and successfully burning game discs was sometimes problematic enough that my friends considered it a black art.)
By 1996, things were changing in the PC space. Unlimited dialup was becoming common. Even AOL went from metered to flat-rate all you-can-eat in that year, and downloading larger things became a lot less of an ordeal.