 By the early 1990s , compact discs were making significant headway as a storage medium for music and video games . NEC had been the first to use compact disc technology in a video game console with their PC Engine CD @-@ ROM ² System add @-@ on in October 1988 in Japan ( launched in North America as the TurboGrafx @-@ CD the following year ) , which sold 80 @,@ 000 units in six months . That same year , Nintendo announced a partnership with Sony to develop its own CD @-@ ROM peripheral for the Super NES . Commodore International released their CD @-@ based <unk> multimedia system centered in early 1991 , while long @-@ in @-@ waiting CD @-@ i from Philips finally arrived towards the end of that year . 
