The mid-90s emergence of CD-ROM drives brought massive storage but severe bandwidth and access time limitations. While many Sega CD titles relied on poor-quality Full Motion Video (FMV), Silpheed stood out for its jaw-dropping animation and artistic taste, leaving players wondering what was real-time 3D versus pre-calculated.

Running on a 12.5MHz m68k CPU with only 16 colors, the game's 15fps video stream was limited to a mere 8 KiB per frame. Unlike other developers who tried to cram movies into the system, Game Arts engineered upward from the system's constraints, utilizing flat shaded polygons and minimal dithering.

To solve the bandwidth problem, Silpheed reduced the video size and framerate. Its video format avoids delta-compression, instead exploiting the tilemap system. By issuing only one of each plain color tile and referencing it repeatedly, the encoder achieved a bandwidth reduction of 50% for certain frames. This bottom-up approach allowed the game to deliver high-quality visuals despite the cumbersome hardware architecture of the Genesis and Mega-CD.