 Up until the middle of 1991 , Sega of America had been kept largely uninformed of the details of the project , without a functioning unit to test ( although Sega of America was provided with preliminary technical documents earlier in the year ) . According to former Sega of America executive producer Michael Latham , " When you work at a multinational company , there are things that go well and there are things that don 't . They didn 't want to send us working Sega CD units . They wanted to send us dummies and not send us the working CD units until the last minute because they were concerned about what we would do with it and if it would leak out . It was very frustrating . " Even though they were not provided a functioning unit , Latham and Sega of America vice president of licensing Shinobu Toyoda put together a functioning Sega CD by acquiring a ROM for the system and installing it in a dummy unit . Further frustrating the Sega of America staff was the construction of the add @-@ on . " The Mega @-@ CD was designed with a cheap , consumer @-@ grade audio CD drive , not a CD @-@ ROM , " stated Scot Bayless , former Sega of America senior producer . " Quite late in the run @-@ up to launch , the quality assurance teams started running into severe problems with many of the units — and when I say severe , I mean units literally bursting into flames . We worked around the clock , trying to catch the failure in @-@ progress , and after about a week we finally realized what was happening , " citing the need of game titles to utilize more time seeking data than the CD drive was designed to provide . 
