03/30 GHOST in the SHELL Kōkakukidōtai Premium Photo•CD
The Saturn is often misunderstood by the laymen as « the poor man’s PlayStation » and that’s in part because such people misunderstand the ambitious multimedia aspirations of the device, and how it reflected the Early 90s’ anticipation of how consumer entertainment would evolve with the help of LASER technology (i.e. the Compact Disc).
Rather than the original PlayStation, if you really want to bring SCE’s own legacy into the conversation, it makes much more sense to compare the Saturn with the PSP and the PS3 ; two other ambitious multimedia devices with a slightly complex architecture, which conceptually aimed to go beyond simple game machines, and similarly got into trouble for these aspirations against more focused direct competitors (the iPod and 360 respectively).
In the case of the Saturn, this ambition is reflected into its OS and home menu, possibly the most complex and rich one made for a home console until the Xbox360 / Wii / PS3 generation. But even with the best of intentions and a demanding price point at launch, not everything could be ready day one and included within the OS, and there were no easily accessible firmware updates at the time, so Sega had to add features through additional peripherals and software.
On June 23, 1995 in Japan, Sega released three important items to further enhance the multimedia capabilities of the Saturn against its competitors: the Video Movie Card (enhancing video decoding and allowing the playback of Video CD), the Photo CD Operator (allowing the access to Kodak’s Photo CD) and the Denshi Book Operator (allowing access to EB, EB-G and EB-XA discs – the prehistory of e-books).
From the angle of promising a fully featured multimedia experience in the living room, it is easy to argue that the relatively modest Sega Group outshone many of its more prestigious and wealthy competitors: Philips’ CD-I, the Panasonic-endorsed 3DO, NEC’s PC-FX, Pioneer’s LaserActive, Apple & Bandai’s Pippin, Olivetti’s Envision etc.
Obviously, in hindsight, Sega’s problem is the multimedia revolution did not happen exactly as anticipated by these wonderful people circa 1992〜1993. The multimedia turn happened on IBM-compatible personal computers instead, with the help of Intel’s x86 technology, the world wide web quickly replacing the CD-ROM as the essential pivot to a digital life, and most importantly Windows 95 convincing casual audiences not to be afraid of computers anymore. The Photo CD, the Video CD (bar some outliers markets for specific local reasons) and the EB-CD never really took off in a mainstream way.
But let’s imagine that you had believed in this alternative vision of a TV-centered multimedia future, and had bought a 
Photo CD Operator or its equivalent 
Photo CD Operating System with the Sega Saturn around the Fall of 1995. What kind of privileged multimedia experience could you and only you have tasted?
Well! For instance, the feature film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, or rather Kōkakukidōtai in its home country, came out in Japanese theaters on November 18, 1995 – I almost waited for the 18th post to sync the dates but let’s not tempt fate with unnecessary hubris – and the first promotional pamphlets released for the movie aped its futuristic tone by foregoing the traditional high quality glossy paper print. Instead, most of the contents were stored digitally on an accompanying Photo CD.
I happen to own this disc, because ❶ c’mon, it’s GiTS ❷ the thing cost me peanuts and ❸ to be frank, I cannot say I have encountered many other cool Photo CDs advocating for this dumb cursed console’s valiant compatibility efforts towards Kodak’s complete flop of a format. Oh, Sega…
That being said, the Photo CD in question is impossibly cool, especially in the context of its release, being about the hottest new animated movie that had reset the expectations of the genre, and before high speed Internet had democratized visual media access. It is a pretty hefty digital archive of Ghost in the Shell, divided in two sections: Shirow’s manga and Production I.G.’s movie. There are about a hundred pictures overall, spanning over quality scans of prep works, layouts, storyboards, animation layers, ideas for album covers, finished manga pages, comparisons with the English translation… It’s pretty eclectic.
To access these images (and convert them from their original .PCD format to .JPG like above) in 2024, you can simply go through a dedicated IrfanView plugin on Windows, for instance. However, please understand that viewing these images this way does not properly reflect the intended experience of seeing these pictures on a CRT screen contemporaneous with Kodak’s Photo CD.
On top of their native resolution (768*512), which is obviously meager for a modern monitor or mobile screen but very fitting of Saturn’s high resolution display mode, these images have a sharpness and a chroma anticipating the output of a S-video or RGB21 cable. In its natural habitat, the rendering of a Photo CD picture on a high quality Trinitron screen is indeed quite stunning and you get why Kodak, Philips, Sega and others believed in it.
From a software point of view, Sega’s Photo CD Operator is also one of the best Photo CD players (among the admittedly few) I have experienced. It displays images faster than many competing multimedia machines, and its navigation menu is fully featured and responsive. It feels like exploring a DVD’s bonus image gallery or a late 90s〜early 00s web shrine, a few years ahead of time.
I wanted to conclude with an example of my favorite contents from the disc; something that would have truly blown my mind had I actually experienced it during the apex of the movie’s hype among anime nerds, around 1995〜1997.
This CD details, through a dozen of stills each time, the making of three specific shots from the movie. A proper exhibition couldn’t do it better, and seeing it again as I upload these pictures, it actually reminds me of that amazing AKIRA exhibition that toured in Japan post-COVID19, right as the country relaxed its tourism restrictions. Breathtaking stuff.
People love machines in 2024 A.D.