Data is indeed read from the inner ring outwards, as anyone with a CD burner in the late ‘90’s and 2000’s is very familiar with.
For audio and video playback, the disk is spun faster at the beginning and progressively more slowly towards the outer edge, a process known as Constant Angular Velocity playback, because more linear distance is covered at the same RPM the larger your circle gets, i.e. the closer you are to the edge. This is no problem for audio playback at “1x” speed because this tops out at a paltry 500 RPM or so.
For data reads, however, most drives use Constant Linear Velocity and spin the disk at the same speed all the time. That means your data throughput is higher at the edges of the disk. The prevalence of 2x, 4x, 16x, 24x, 40x, 52x, etc. PC CD (and DVD, etc.) also means that those drives will spin a disk way faster than a regular CD player will which can definitely cause a problem with irregularly shaped disks like the one in OP’ photo. They would also inevitably only achieve their rated whatever-x speed when reading at the very edge of a full disk. (You mean the marketing department was deliberately misleading??? Say it ain’t so!)
Those little business card disks were nonstandard but would work in most tray loading drives, and held a whopping 30 megs.
The 80mm minis were envisioned as “CD Singles,” and they actually were defined as part of the official CD standard. Therefore most CD players and drives including slot loaders actually were and are designed to work with them without incident. Typical tray loaders have a smaller indent below the main one to accept the smaller disks, and pretty much all horizontally oriented slot loaders will take them as well.
This would play just fine in a snap-in (like a Discman) or tray loading CD player. It might give slot loaders some trouble but it looks like it still describes most of a 120mm circle so it would probably work fine in those as well.
For audio playback. At 1x speed.
The real problem with these novelty shaped disks is when you stick them in a fast PC CD-ROM drive, they’re usually badly unbalanced and when your drive dutifully tries to spin them at 8,000, 15,000, or 20,000 RPM when it indexes the disk or when someone tries to copy it – not outside the realm of possibility for a commodity 40x drive – the disk will warp and vibrate like crazy and in some cases eventually crack and then outright explode inside the drive.
I once had to disassemble somebody’s drive and tweezer out the sparkly bits of a Ranma 1/2 CD that I discovered, when rearranging the pieces back together on the workbench like a jigsaw puzzle, was one of these damn novelty disks that was shaped like Ranma-chan’s head. The largest fragment left over was smaller than a dime, and surprisingly the drive still worked after I unjammed it and got all of the glitter out of it ultimately using compressed air.
These were uncommon, but not unheard of. For instance, Metallica also infamously released this fucking thing:
And nerds absolutely will find each other and bond over whatever their thing is. The world is full of stories like this one. People who met their spouses in World of Warcraft, and so on and so forth.
But boy, am ever I glad us M:tG nerds had much more subtle ways to signal our dorkitude. At least I think we did.
I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.
Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2’s cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck’s sake, Gabe.
My account is so old I have (or had, before they normalized the format) a four digit steam ID. I “owned” Half Life 2 for like four months before it released thanks to getting a code free in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro back in the day. For a short and glorious flash of time in the summer of 2004, I was guaranteed a copy of the most hotly anticipated game ever, even though nobody could play it yet, and also owned an example of the fastest video card on the planet. Damned if I didn’t mow a fuckton of lawns and reinstall Windows and Outlook an a horde of septuagenarians’ computers to afford that card.
Gee, for the same money… a digital brontosaurus for Orc Game that you need to pay a recurring subscription to actually use, can be taken away from you at any time, or one day the servers may simply be turned off erasing not only your “investments” but also your years of “work.” Or, I don’t know, a CIVIVI Hyperpulse with a groovy pattern welded blade that also happens to be a physical object you can actually hold in your hands and keep forever. Just to pick something out of a hat.
One of the power ups you can buy is literally to dispense friends (options) which follow you around and shoot alongside you. You can crank out as many as you want, at least within reason. And in some of the Parodius games they are literally little dudes. Or depending on your character, little octopi, cats, or penguins.
Which typically culminates in rolling up everyone on Earth by the time you get to the final stage, no less. If that’s not a group hug, I don’t know what is.
Edit: I’m also going to second the Psychonauts recommendation, especially the second game. Despite the gameplay itself inevitably lending itself to the protagonist performing every little bit of work by himself, there are strong themes of teamwork all throughout the game’s story and the excellence of its final sequence cannot be understated:
Obviously no one’s seen it happen first hand. It’s a projection based on what’s known about the materials and how they’re made. Burned CD-R’s have definitely been out in the real world for people to learn how short their lifespans can be, though.
Nobody could “prove,” for instance, that the Voyager 1 could stay operational in deep space for 47+ years when it was launched in 1977, but the engineers could still predict and they launched it anyway, and it did. I don’t think your argument really holds water.
Don’t conflate a mastered CD with an aluminum data layer with a recordable CD-R or CD-RW, which use organic dyes that have a significantly shorter lifespan.
A properly manufactured CD can last 200+ years if it’s stored in a dry environment free of UV exposure and high levels of moisture.
Even a quality CD-R can’t really be expected to retain all of its data integrity for much more than 10 years.
Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software.
Worse, this thing from Sony was on music CD’s and not even games.
The Sony Rootkit debacle is one of the reasons that I still will not do business with Sony in any of its guises, for any reason, no matter the price. And believe me, I have a long memory.