I never had a Laserdisc player either growing up we were VHS and then straight to DVD. I had never even heard of them until recently and then after watching some videos I was like what is this magical disk
. They look cool, display great and are a fun niche thing to collect. The quality was actually pretty good as well and well above VHS. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel would go on their show and rave about how much better they were than VHS. I think they never took off because they were way more expensive than VHS (around $90-$100 per title back in the 90s) and you couldn't record TV on a Laserdisc like you could with VHS. I heard they grabbed about 1% market share in North America at their peak.