Around 2003 my mom found a funky CD player and gave it to me for my HiFi setup. It took forever to boot up, and it was heavy as shit, but it played CD'S! I never heard of CDi, but I had a feeling it the weird CD player was meant to do something more.
Anyways it took too much space and weighed as much as a cinder block so I threw it outside in my dads scrap pile.
Long story short my friend and I got bored one day and beat it with hammers. It wasn't until the video game nerd covered it back in 07 that I realized what I had done lmao. Still wish I had it now that I collect vintage video games.
I knew someone in school that had a CD-i and I was excited to try out the Zelda game... I made a terrible mistake as did the people that made it. It's probably still a cool collector's item, but man it was bad.
zod, CD-i is what all true programmers strive for!
My Mom was an artist for a small game developer in Bermuda (of all places...) In the 90s.
Not only did they have one of these in the office, which I would spend a lot of time at after school, but she had one at home as well. So I spent a formidable part of my childhood trying to learn CD-I games.
The two we had at home (I do not know their names and I've tried looking them up) were:
Photorealistic Ultraviolent Cyberpunk... It was like an FPS and Point and Click adventure at the same time. Lawnmower Man vibes.
Japanese Feudal Defence Simulator... Another FPS where you would defend a castle from waves of approaching samurai with a Bow.
The controller was a wackadoodle Trackball design and honestly a pain in the ass to use, but superior to my NES which I had (as my only comparison).
We never bought more games as... Well... They weren't sold on the island.
Edit: I've also played the Zelda game at the office, but honestly it was like they tried to make a Mario game using Zelda, and as stated below: it was awful.
This is the kind of story I was hoping to hear in this thread.
Did you enjoy it at the time, or was there a sense of it not being a great console? I know that we were much more forgiving of janky games back then, so it's hard to look at it fairly from 2025.
Graphically it was superior to anything else I had played (SNES and Genesis were the two available at the time) but it definately lacked polish, even to 8 year old me. The real kicker is that everything about it just looked... Different from what was being pushed by Nintendo and Sega with their consoles.
I also had access to PCs which would play Wolfenstien3D, so I would say the game play was also somewhat superior, but the CDi lacked depth with the games. (Or I was too young to advance in them beyong the first levels due to difficulty)
I also just remembered that there was another game which was incredibly well made... And it was all 90s western cartoon styled about a knight trying to save a princess from a dragon.
You don't know the names of the TWO games you owned on the CD-i? How hard could it possibly be to research that? All you gotta do is find the wikipedia entry of the CD-i list of games. How many could there POSSIBLY be? 20? Just check one by one the screen shots from each game until you're like "Oh that's the one!"
Its so much easier to have strangers on the internet do it for free.
Is your first game "Burn Cycle"? https://www.mobygames.com/game/3962/burncycle/
or maybe Freedom Fighter? https://www.mobygames.com/game/21664/freedom-fighter/
One of my favorite fun facts about video game consoles is that both the PlayStation and CD-i exist largely due to Nintendo being an ass to Sony and Phillips while looking for a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES to compete with the Sega CD. After getting the run around, both companies basically said ‘fine fuck it we are making our own consoles with blackjack and hookers…’
Sony would have got the licensing rights to every game and would have got a very large cut of the every game sold on the Super Disc format. Some lawyer looked over the contract after they signed it and that's why Nintendo backed out. Its not like it was all on Nintendo, it does seem like a very Sony thing to think they have full control over their formats.
Which goes go show, Nintendo have always been assholes and it's nothing new. Even when they shoot themselves in the foot doing so, they'll never miss an opportunity.
During Covid, I had to sell a childhood treasure: my JVC X'EYE, still complete with original controller and power supply, fully functional.
But the shop owner did right by me, cleaned up my old discs, and we went through them one by one before I left, as he'd never seen one in person, either.
My favorite part is that it was the cheap, knock-off alternative when I was a kid, but now it's crazy valuable because it was so rare.
I have an X`Eye, love that thing. It has the best sound out of any genesis model IMO.
I used to watch these game console startup compilations https://youtu.be/Wntf-pM5k2E , and the X'Eye and Wondermega felt like fever dreams like lol imagine booting up a game console on Christmas morning and there's a dancing X or W with music that feels exactly like staying up past 6AM. I could not believe those existed.
It's such a crazy throwback. Mine came bundled with Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia and Prize Fighter for Sega CD , I believe. Or maybe I got Prize Fighter separately. Also how I discovered the Spin Doctors song "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong," because it also had a karaoke feature. And, yes, Christmas morning exactly.
To think the CD-i, 3DO, and Jaguar were all "next gen" only to have the PlayStation/N64/Saturn (hey it did really well in Japan) absolutely blow their doors off is hilarious in hindsight.
Granted, it was a very uncertain time in gaming. And maybe these high dollar systems weren't trying to directly compete with the younger market of Nintendo/Sega. What did the mature gamer want? More bits? CD-ROM multimedia adventures? Something you can put on your entertainment center on top of your VCR that isn't just for the kids? These were all promising directions at one point in time.
Ultimately, the PlayStation and Saturn would come along and refocus on the games themselves, making 64 bit gaming seem irrelevant and essentially killing FMV-based gaming. The arrival of the N64 would solidify this.
It was an interesting time in gaming. Units like the CD-i and 3DO commanded huge sums of money and offered very little back in the way of quality gaming. Some people bought into the hype thinking they were buying into the next generation when the industry took a very different direction.
Hey, thanks for the 3DO shout-out, although I'm not sure it falls into the same category of failure. When my dad was getting his shit together (at least, somewhat together), he got to work with those guys before getting a more stable job. While it's certainly true about FMV gaming, their demise in particular is attributed more to business practices, like utilizing costly third parties for hardware- ironic since they all seem to do that now.
Many of their games hold up, though there aren't very many and the only solid IPs got cross platform releases or ports (e.g. Gex) especially after it was clear 3DO was tanking. I think playing Star Control II on 3DO might have defined who I am as a gamer, and I highly recommend playing subsequent rereleases (it was PC only without 3DO!)
I think playing Star Control II on 3DO might have defined who I am as a gamer, and I highly recommend playing subsequent rereleases (it was PC only without 3DO!)
I'm sure you're aware that the original developers are working on a sequel after all these years!
It's to be called Free Stars: Children of Infinity, after the series itself was renamed to Free Stars
It was a strange time.
There were so many competitors all of a sudden. CD-i, 3DO, Jaguar. Even Commodore had the CD32. Nobody had one, it was all Mega Drives and SNES.
Nobody could seem to decide if CDs were the future or 3D. I guess Sony's success came out of nowhere but also because they hedged their bets and made the only machine that could really do both. Games like Final Fantasy VII that really made use of both were a pipe dream for other platforms.
Plus they realised that because CDs were cheap to make, budget re-releases could be a thing again. Seeing dozens of great games at £20 a go certainly swayed me from the competition.
Hey don't hassle the CD-i, it was trying to do something no one had done and probably shoudn't have.
but it shipped, didn't it! Looking at you pippin.
but it shipped, didn't it! Looking at you pippin.
Wtf? I've never even heard of this thing. Might have to look into emulators, for curiosity sake.
You're better off watching videos. The games are all notoriously bad.
An emulator also isn't going to give you the experience of dropped inputs that the CDI was known for.
You probably don't, there is not a single good game on there!
So yeah, Philips was granted usage of Mario, Luigi, Bowser, Peach, Link, Zelda, Impa, and Ganon. One Mario game and two Zelda games were made, and they were so bad they were funny, to the point they were basically the backbone of Internet culture when several people made silly nonsensical remixes of the cutscenes.
Those games were in fact so important to many people's lives that a spiritual successor, Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, was a success and even had a limited edition that came with the infamous CD-i "spoon" controller. What an amazing way to play a platformer...
There is also one more Zelda game that is forgotten by just about everyone. As the others were so bad they were funny, this one was so bad it was just bad. Try watching this without getting bored (impossible) https://youtu.be/IqFZ1iVmhIo
We had these in school one year. Of course, it being school means that all of the games available were educational. The school actually let parents rent them for like a month at a time, which is something my parents did. Too bad we couldn't keep it.
I had one of these as a kid. I was pretty young but I remember this being next level for me.
I didn't play traditional games on it though. They had interactive Arthur books that you could control. It would read out the page with some animations. Then you would use the controller to click around the page and find all the hidden animations. It was pretty awesome as an educational e-reader tool.
Did you... want to?
There are some gaps in a collection that serve as a show of sanity, not shame.
I remember being in a vacation park with my parents. All the bungalows had a CDi player, and you could rent games at the reception. I also remember thinking that all those CDi games were glorified DVD menus....
I also remember thinking that all those CDi games were glorified DVD menus....
DVD menus had built in games with more gameplay than CD-i games lol
Lol. That's true! There are DVD menu games with higher approval ratings than some CD-I games.
That's feels like an accurate description.
To be fair, the graphics were a step up from the 8bit (or 16bit?) games I was playing at the time.
I remember playing a demo unit of a CD-i at Rich's while my mom shopped (this was back when department stores still had electronics departments). Whatever game they had available on it was so boring that it was only slightly better than following her around looking at clothes. I also remember, at other times in the same place, playing Sonic on Genesis and messing around with MS Paint on a Windows 3.1 PC. Of the three experiences, the CD-i experience was by far the least fun.
I have one. It no longer reads media :(
My friend had one--it had really cool graphics for the time but the gameplay on everything was kinda shit. He only had a few games so maybe there were ones that didn't suck but I can't imagine there was much that could compete with even the average level of game for PS1 or N64.
Go Apple Pippin!
There you go
Interesting, was this a next-gen competitor for the likes of 3DO?
My cousin had one. The games were wired.
I should also note that the image linked is bit wrong, I was playing a CDi several years before the PS1 or N64 released.
So a comparison is better towards SNES and Genesis vs CDi.
