Chatting about Laseractive for an article? [Archive]

Steve W

07-20-2009, 11:02 PM

I bought a Laseractive around the time they were being discontinued (otherwise, I would have never bothered, considering their original price tags!). I picked mine up for $200, sold as a floor model without a box or a remote control (which I ordered from Pioneer directly). I wanted it because a few years earlier I had put together a Pioneer stereo rack system, and I really wanted to get into laserdiscs. Plus, I'm a video game geek, so having a two-in-one machine was pretty attractive to me. Well, the Incredible Universe store I picked it up at had already gotten rid of their Laseractive games a week prior, but luckily a few months earlier I had bought Pyramid Patrol. To be honest, I'm not sure why I did that, considering the Laseractive with a Sega Mega LD module was far out of my price range at that time. So, I just bought a floor model Laseractive and I had a game to play on it. But I had no Sega or PC Engine module to play games with. So it was used to watch laserdisc movies. It was cool to move into that arena, since laserdiscs (good ones at least) had features that you couldn't find on VHS. My first LD was the movie Clerks, which had a commentary track on it, plus extended scenes and the original ending that was cut for release. Something you take for granted in this day and age with DVD extras, but it was astoundingly cool back then to have an anime LD playable with dubbed audio or the original Japanese voices.

Well, Tandy Corporation decided to close down the Incredible Universe stores. Near the end, when they'd scraped up anything out of the back room to sell, I discovered on a table filled with junk a Sega Mega LD module. The laserdisc machines for it to work with were long gone, so they marked it down to $5. I grabbed it up immediately. I regret that I didn't pick up the Karaoke module that was also there, strangely priced at $20. So now I had the LD player and the module that would let me play the games. Unfortunately, I only had one game. Pyramid Patrol was a decent game, with really great looking CG backgrounds, but in the end it was an okay shooting game with pretty background graphics. So I started picking up Sega CD games, since I'd never owned one of those units in the past, and the Mega LD let me play Genesis and Sega CD games on the Laseractive. Sure, there were problems... the Surgical Strike CD-ROM kept getting stuck inside the unit and I'd have to fish it out, scratching up the disc in the process... Still, it got me into another console that I had wanted to start collecting for. Eventually I managed to purchase another Laseractive game in the late '90s off the internet, the game Rocket Coaster. It's a sort-of racing game where you have to stay on the rail of a rollercoaster style track as it winds through some nice looking CG environments. Not quite as fun as Pyramid Patrol, though.

I regret not having enough money back in the day to afford the machine while it was still on the market. I would have loved to have been able to pick up the 3D goggles and some of the other games. But the prices on the Laseractive and its accessories were just too steep. I could only afford the console when it was on the downward slide. I don't do eBay, I do my video game shopping in 'the wild', places like retro game stores, flea markets, and thrift stores. So it's fairly unlikely that I'll ever come across any Laseractive games or accessories. Still, I had fun with it, so that's all that matters.