Macromedia Shockwave -

Shockwave was the high-end sibling of the more famous (and simpler) . While Flash was for vector animations and "skip intro" buttons, Shockwave was a beast designed for serious multimedia.

Because Director was built for CD-ROMs (unlimited storage), developers ported huge assets directly to the web. You would wait 4 minutes for a progress bar to load a "game" that was actually a 15MB Director file. Performance was abysmal on anything less than a top-tier Pentium III. macromedia shockwave