Released in 1995, WC4 was produced on the then-unheard-of budget of USD $12 million.[1] The majority of this budget went to the shooting of its full motion video, which retained the previous game's cast and used real sets instead of bluescreen techniques. The game required 6 CD-ROMs, but was later re-released on DVD for special DVD-ROM kits. A single-sided DVD version simply repackaged the game's content, while a double-sided DVD edition re-encoded the video to MPEG2 DVD-quality. [2] A novelization, by William R. Forstchen and Ben Ohlander, was published on October 1, 1996.