Philips CD-i

~ the obituary ~

the philips cd-i was a multimedia console launched in the united states in late 1991, originally priced near one thousand us dollars. it was supposed to be the television-attached cd-rom platform that brought interactive media into the living room, with games as a secondary application. philips imagined people watching movies on it, doing edutainment with their kids, and occasionally playing a game. almost none of that happened. by 1996 philips had effectively abandoned the format. the formal end-of-life came in 1998.

the most famous things on the cd-i are four games philips published under a licensing deal with nintendo. that deal had originated in the failed early-nineties sony-nintendo cd-rom add-on for the super famicom. when sony walked away to build the playstation, nintendo cut a smaller deal with philips that gave philips the right to make games using mario and zelda characters. the result was hotel mario in 1994 and three zelda games released between 1993 and 1994. they are uniformly considered the worst games in either franchise.

i did not have a cd-i. in 1991 i was seven years old in ankara on a household 386. the cd-i never had a turkish distributor and was priced for western european salaries when it did reach europe. the first time i saw any cd-i footage was probably a decade later, through a youtube poop video that someone had cut from the hotel mario cutscenes. that is how most people my age outside of the original markets met it.

~ the case file ~

~ the pitch ~

cd-i was technically a standards spec, defined in 1986 by philips and sony as a way to push compact discs beyond audio. philips built the hardware. you got an mpeg video card as an optional add-on, a wireless controller that looked like a tv remote, and a cd-rom drive that took the cd-i format discs. the device sat under a tv. it would also play audio cds and karaoke cds, which is what most owners actually ended up using it for.

the marketing positioned it as a thing for the whole family. it would teach your kids about dinosaurs. it would let your parents browse photo discs. you would watch movies on it once philips and the studios figured out video compression. some of this happened. very little of it justified the price tag.

~ the zelda games ~

the three zelda spinoffs were developed by external studios working without much nintendo input. two of them, link: the faces of evil and zelda: the wand of gamelon, were made by an american studio called animation magic in 1993. zelda's adventure followed in 1994 from a different developer. they used full-motion-video cutscenes drawn by a russian animation house in moscow. the cutscenes are slow and oddly paced, and the voice acting in them has aged into a meme genre of its own. "gee, it sure is boring around here." "my boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for." "mah boi."

hotel mario is the same idea but with mario and a set of hotels that need their doors closed. it has the cutscene where mario explains that all toasters toast toast. there is a generation of internet-meme users who have only ever seen mario in this form, and who would not recognize a real nintendo mario game beside it.

~ what killed it ~

cd-i was killed by every neighbor it had. the sony playstation arrived in 1994 in japan and 1995 in the west, with better games at half the price. the cd-rom drive in every desktop pc by 1995 made the dedicated multimedia-cd box unnecessary. philips had bet the format on a 1980s vision of interactive television that the actual nineties did not need. by 1996 the company had stopped marketing the device. about a million units had shipped worldwide, four hundred thousand of them in the united states. bill gates later said the cd-i was a terrible game machine and a terrible pc, which is one of the rare things bill gates was correct about without qualification.

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