Why did the Windows 95 CD have extra fun stuff?

Date:January 3, 2006 / year-entry #1
Tags:history
Orig Link:https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060103-52/?p=32853
Comments:    13
Summary:Why did the Windows 95 CD have extra fun stuff, like the Good Times and Buddy Holly music videos, the Rob Roy trailer, and the cartoons by Bill Plympton? Because it was fun! Why does one have to justify having fun? In addition to the multimedia fun, there was also video game fun, with the...

Why did the Windows 95 CD have extra fun stuff, like the Good Times and Buddy Holly music videos, the Rob Roy trailer, and the cartoons by Bill Plympton? Because it was fun! Why does one have to justify having fun?

In addition to the multimedia fun, there was also video game fun, with the addition of Pinball and the mercifully-forgotten hovercraft game Hover! (Some of us thought it was so awful, we secretly called it Hoover!)

[While Raymond was on vacation, the autopilot stopped working due to a power outage. This entry has been backdated.]

Comments (13)
  1. Puckdropper says:
    January 3, 2006 at 3:44 am

    I liked Hover!. That and Pitfall! The Mayan Adventure were the two "adventure" games I played most when we got our first "real" computer. Pentium 75, whopping 16 MB of RAM, and 16.7 million color display. We had it good then. (-:

    Glad to see you back, Raymond.

  2. novas0x2a says:
    January 3, 2006 at 4:15 am

    Man, I also thought Hover was great. And I think Pitfall must have come with the Aptiva or something, because I played hours of that.

  3. Thomas says:
    January 3, 2006 at 5:35 am

    I rather liked Hover, myself. Any chance of opening up the specs for the map and music files?

  4. Ben Cooke says:
    January 3, 2006 at 8:44 am

    I remember playing hover while there was nothing else installed on my new Win95 PC. Got bored of it pretty quickly! :)

  5. afed says:
    January 3, 2006 at 9:56 am

    4 out of 5 buttes, agree, Hover is the tops!

  6. Nicholas says:
    January 3, 2006 at 9:59 am

    I remember buying a faster CD-ROM drive just so I could stream the videos off the CD in realtime.

    Man, I am a geek.

    Microsoft needs to do more partnering like that– I loved when they joined up with Rolling Stones for "Start Me Up". In Vista, there should be some WMV-HD music videos once more, or some short films. Mmm.

  7. Jonathan says:
    January 3, 2006 at 1:57 pm

    Of course, all that content make the 35MB Win95 install into a 270MB CD. And while it does nothing bad in the CD (it’s not like they’d make smaller-size CDs), I saw technicians that, wanting to ensure their customers can re-install, copy the entire CD to the computer, videos and all. 270MB used to be a lot…

  8. Dominic Self says:
    January 3, 2006 at 11:53 am

    I liked Hover too! *gets coat*

  9. Terazilla says:
    January 3, 2006 at 10:09 pm

    The thing I actually remember thinking at the time is, how many copies does a typical music video sell? Does the fact that the Buddy Holly video was on the Win95 CD mean it "sold" an astronomical number?

  10. Vorn says:
    January 4, 2006 at 6:44 am

    afed: I don’t think I want to get my gaming advice from a land formation.

    :)

    Vorn

  11. dwave says:
    January 4, 2006 at 8:22 am

    I loved when they joined up with Rolling Stones for

    > "Start Me Up"

    I especially liked the lyrics of ‘Start me up’: You, you, you make a grown man cry – how appropriate.

  12. quanta says:
    January 8, 2006 at 6:10 pm

    I don’t think the odd thing was that Win95 had all these cool multimedia goodies (it’s well known how much money MS dumped into W95 marketing), but that Win98 utterly had nothing – trailer videos of terrible videogames does not count.

  13. Let's Kill Dave! says:
    July 31, 2006 at 8:52 am

    If you ever hope to be a great Windows programmer, take the time to read/subscribe toRaymond Chen’s blog,

Comments are closed.


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