Behold the Philips CD-i! It’s got Mario! Zelda! Movies on CD! Uh, interactive encyclopedias! What could go wrong? Apparently, everything.
Born out of the same aborted efforts to create a CD-based console for Nintendo that would eventually produce the Sony Playstation, the CD-i was an ambitious attempt to create a multi-purpose home entertainment console. However, instead of kickstarting the trend of CD-based gaming, the CD-i turned into one of the great failures of the video game industry, reportedly costing Philips near a billion dollars by the time it was discontinued.
Nonetheless, it did end up fostering some amazingly idiosyncratic (and widely reviled) pieces of video game history.
Since I’m Dutch and have lived in The Netherlands my whole life, I feel like the CD-i is a much greater part of my memory than of people in other countries. Philips is a Dutch company, after all, and I vaguely recall the CD-i being hyped into the stratosphere over here. I wanted one when the hype started, but I never did even see one in real life.
The CD-i was very weird, and existed in a time where any company could just launch a console into existence. Everything about this console was wrong. Very expensive, crap library, bad controllers.
If you’re not nearly as fun as the toys that are much cheaper, you’re going to have a bad time.
I got a CD-i as a gift from my dad in 1993 with two games, The Deadalus Encounter and Burn Cycle. I thought it was fun and brought it on the ship with me in 95 and everyone found it unique. The only problem was that I could never find any games so I only had the two. While on the cruise we hit port in UAE and there was this video game shop in Dubai that had a ton of CD-i games that they were trying to get rid of but couldn’t, still very early days of in-home internet and no eBay (though I just read that it started that same year). I got a couple dozen games for $100. It made the rest of the cruise, still over four months left, a lot more bearable. It wasn’t a great system but I enjoyed it at the time, and I never spent more than that $100.
If it didn’t have Street Fighter in the early 90s, and wasn’t a home computer, it was bound to fail.
EDIT: Unless it was a NEO GEO console. Those are an entirely different beast.
Edited 2018-05-23 22:37 UTC
The only good place to play Street Fighter was the arcade.
To be honest, I never saw CD-i media for sale here in Germany. I have no idea where I could’ve bought any additional ones…
I saw a CDI in Dixons with my Dad when we were shopping as a Family for a VCR (back when they cost several hundreds of pounds).
Even when I was 10 they looked a bit rubbish. Nobody really understood what they were for. They didn’t play games very well and they didn’t play video very well.
It was obviously some high level manager in the company used Encarta and thought it was amazing and wanted it on his television.
Edited 2018-05-23 20:14 UTC
Speaking of overpriced toy CD-Rom systems… I have a Panasonic 3DO at home…
The 3D0, though, wasn’t nearly as bad, and was actually a power system for it’s time. It was expensive, but that’s not the same as overpriced.
Though, it did probably price itself out of the market.
On the other hand, it did have some great games. It’s port of Samurai Showdown, for example, was easily the most faithful port.
The PS1 was dominate because the rest was rubbish in comparison.
The 3DO was silly money compared to the PS1. Almost every retro game review channel admits this.
Edited 2018-05-23 22:40 UTC
I lump the 3DO together with the Jaguar and the 32X. They all came out about the same time, had relatively similar specs, and all failed for roughly the same reasons. The 3DO was the most powerful of the lot, followed by the Jaguar, trailed by the 32X.
I used to sell these at Media Play in the ’90s (don’t think I ever sold one though, even the 3DO sold better than this) and we had a demo unit in the store. The “games” really were about the worst ever and MS ate the whole digital-encyclopedia lunch with Encarta at the time. The one thing this did have were some pretty nifty CD-i music video discs from a few forward-thinking artists (IIRC Peter Gabriel and David Bowie each had one) but that wasn’t worth the price tag.
There was a fast food joint (Burger King, maybe?) that announced they would be installing CD-i units in their stores. I have ever only seen one CD-i unit, and it was in one of those places during the time between they made the announcement and it petered out.
Didn’t get to play with it, because a munchkin was monopolizing it.
I saw one in use at a car dealer just a couple of years ago. I think the CD-i was pretty succesful in the niche demo/show room.
Family friends had a Philips CD-I which must’ve come with Zelda (can’t imagine why else they had Zelda, they were not gamers).
I played it on the few occasions I had, but found the controls extremely awkward (to the point of being unplayable).
There was also a skating game which was even worse (because it was much faster than Zelda).
I think the whole thing was hampered by the fact that it was controlled by a normal IR remote control which at the time was not quick enough for real gaming.
in addition to games, there was an extensive CD library of movie titles that could also be played on a PC at the time. My 1995 Packard Bell had a 4x cd rom that could easily read those disks. I picked up a few late into the cycle.
The actual CDs had an MPEG 1 file on them. The biggest problem was that most movies required two CDs. So in the middle of the movie, you had to change disks. It was a nice predecessor to DVDs but not the quality of a laser disc.
Yeah, I still have my CDi version of Star Trek VI. The biggest issue with playing these discs on a PC was that they used CDI format CDs, not ISO/Sierra like every other CD out. It meant most PCs (or Macs, too) needed a custom filesystem handler to read the discs.
VideoCD is still a popular format in parts of Asia.
Back in the days when I was a kid, there was an CD-i player at the V&D in Maastricht, at the electronics department in the basement.
Later, when I has my first job at Mc Donalds, the instruction video’s were played on a CD-i player.
Bought a bunch of failed/obsolete game consoles second-hand dirt cheap around 1997: Panasonic 3DO, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx handheld, NES with lightgun and yes a pop-top Philips CD-i with FMV (full-motion video chip). I didn’t have many games for it (definitely not the sub-Nintendo ones), they weren’t that good and IIRC could be awkward e.g. if two players wanted to race each other in Micro Machines, that involved both players having to use different ends of the same controller!
The only game I really played was Demolition Man (with full motion Stallone!), but not much. Otherwise I used it to play films on VCDs I’d buy from the Chinese shops in Soho, like The Replacement Killers and Dr. Wai in “The Scriptures with No Words”. (The late 90s was “peak VCD” in Hong Kong and East Asia.)
Of all the consoles, it was the one I spent the least time on. A fraction of what I spent on Alien vs Predator on the Jag and Return Fire on the 3DO.
Edited 2018-05-24 19:31 UTC