The Sega CD is my favorite console and I was fortunate enough to have one growing up. Silpheed was unlike anything else. Unlike most FMV games, Silpheed actually felt like controlling a movie. During the first level when laser blasts are tearing through the fleet gigantic ships filling the screen with debris, I could barely believe what I was seeing.

As the article points out, while it is an FMV game, it tries to fool you into thinking it’s a polygon based game. The Sega CD had no 3D capabilities at all (just 2D rotation and scale). But GameArts pulls off the FMV so convincingly, down to the aliasing, that it’s hard to understand (at least to my 12-year old self) how it could be anything other than 3D rendering.

It’s often panned as not the best shooter, but the gameplay was secondary to the experience. I don’t know how it would play for someone who didn’t experience it at the time, but it will always be one of my favorites on the system.

Yeah Silpheed is a great example of designing a game around the strengths of its target hardware. Because they were able to focus the art design around what could be streamed at high quality off a 1x CD drive, the FMV works a lot better than it did in games like Night Trap and Wirehead that tried to shoehorn live action video into a console that wasn't capable of displaying it at a decent quality. The actual gameplay is similar to an early 1980s arcade game like Galaga, but I agree with you that the presentation makes it worth playing at least a few levels of Silpheed even now.

I remember when people would talk about a new game they hadn't yet tried and the first question was "How are the graphics?". They truly did amazing work back then to push the limits of systems so they could present things that the machine wasn't expressly built to accomplish.

The soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal. I pull it up on Youtube once a year or so just for kicks.

Silpheed by Sierra On-Line for the PC — ported from the Japanese PC-8801 — was similarly good, possibly the first game I played with a proper sound card. The MT-32 version blew my twelve-year-old mind.

I just saw a video of it. Impressive. Were the enemy ships hand drawn 3D plastered on sprites? Or was there some actual realtime 3D rendered by the CPU? The boss ship I saw looked like realtime 3D.