Gaming History You Should Know – What Happened to the World’s Biggest CRT TV May 26, 2025

It’s Sunday and you know what that means? Time for a new Gaming History You Should Know, where we highlight some of the best independently-produced documentaries from across the web. Today, we’re going to be talking about an obsolete technology that was a major component of all gamer’s lives….up until the mid-to-late 2000s, the CRT television.

Growing up, a CRT was all we had to view any kind of video content, whether it was television, video games, or movies. I have to admit, with the exception of using them for PC monitors, I HATED them. They were HEAVY, and there was no way to minimize its weight if you had a larger model. In all likelihood once you had a CRT placed in your space, it would stay there for the entire lifespan of your home. Nobody wanted to move these things. However, there were a lot of good about CRTs. They had a nearly perfect response rate that would make even the lowest latency flat-panel monitor blush. Game developers of its time also took its interlacing functions into account, which is why many older games look better on them than they do on newer non-interlaced HDTVs.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have a BIG CRT because they just didn’t exist. Most televisions that advertised themselves as “BIG” were actually rear projection, which while they were indeed big, suffered from a poorer image quality than CRT and also posed the constant risk of image burn. However, for a very long time, there has been a mythical Holy Grail of CRTs, a BIG CRT capable of EDTV input over composite made by Sony. However, only one picture of the BIG TV existed in the wild, and nobody was totally sure if it was legit.

Was this CRT real, and if it was, does it still exist? Well, the guys over at the YouTube Channel Shank Mods did a fantastic documentary about this mythical CRT, and their attempt to recover it. Let’s find out how they did!