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.
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…’
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.
Wtf? I’ve never even heard of this thing. Might have to look into emulators, for curiosity sake.
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
Honestly that Zelda game is my favorite for how absolutely ugly it is. I can’t make heads or tails of what’s going on in it.
What were those devs thinking? No textboxes so deaf people can’t play, there’s one dungeon whose boss cannot be defeated with the weapon found in it (the weapon does NO DAMAGE lmao) and the ending is so bad the whole thing is just BAD
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.
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.
Interesting, was this a next-gen competitor for the likes of 3DO?
I have one. It no longer reads media :(
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 cousin had one. The games were wired.
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.
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.
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/
I never got through that stupid asteroid field in Burn:Cycle
Burn Cycle! Thank you!
I’ve never really tried searching for the game names. This thread has been great!
Maybe I should set up an emulator and get some nostalgia flowing.
Glad I could help!
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.
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.
I think you’re talking about Dragon’s Lair– I wouldn’t necessarily call it well made. It was designed as an arcade game to munch through your quarters, so the gameplay felt pretty unfair with very short timing on everything.
That’s the one.
I mean, it was better made than the other games I had access to.
And yes, its Ninja Gaiden levels of difficult.
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.
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.
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.
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.
