Hardware Heaven: Laseractive

» Manufacturer: Pioneer Corporation » Year: 1993 » cost: $970 (launch), (£150+ today)

It’s easy to dismiss Pioneer’s entry into the videogame market. After all, it wasn’t even released in Europe, being available in Japan and America only, and it just looks like a large high-end CD player that would be more at home as part of your hi-fi set up than in your games room. Nevertheless, looks can be deceiving and a closer inspection of the hefty machine actually reveals it to be an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia player, a machine that could pretty much do anything at the time of release, aside from actually become a success for Pioneer.

It’s worth noting that the Laseractive really could do it all, whether it was playing the latest Laserdiscs or Compact Discs, having a karaoke session thanks to its ability to play LD-G discs, or simply play games. The machine itself didn’t have a fantastic array of exclusive games and many were Fmv-based like Time Gal, Road Blaster and Triad

Stone. All games required special PAC modules in order to play them, and Sega’s was by far the most popular as it allowed Laseractive owners to play a variety of Laserdisc games, alongside Mega CD games and Mega Drive cartridges, something which opened up the machine’s library substantially (but at a very high cost of $600).

There was even a PAC module for NEC’S PC Engine (NEC itself would release its own system called the LD-ROM²

System) which was rarer to find at the time (and now fetches a handsome price on the second-hand market), but it didn’t help at all. Pioneer’s expensive price point (nearly $1,000 in the States) and the fact it was utilising largely underpowered technology meant it simply couldn’t compete with the incoming consoles from the likes of Sega, Sony and 3DO. As a result it remains a bizarre footnote in gaming’s history.