The Philips CD-i is a failed system, best remembered for its peculiar connections to far more successful ones.
Here's how the story goes: Nintendo wanted to make a CD-ROM drive for the SNES to face Sega's upcoming Mega-CD. They had a deal with Sony, realized it was a bad deal, and jumped ship to Philips (which kinda makes sense, as Sony and Philips had invented the CD together). Sony was pissed and decided to make their own console with blackjack and hookers, and so the PlayStation was born. Meanwhile, Nintendo got cold feet again, the new deal went nowhere as well, so Philips also decided to do their own thing, and that was the CD-i.
The less-know part of this story, however, is that Philips actually had been working on the CD-i long before the SNES existed. And it was not even supposed to be a console, but an "interactive multimedia CD player" for educational titles, digital encyclopedias, museum tour kiosks, this sort of boring "rich old man" crap (that's why the original controller was more like a TV remote than a gamepad). The brief almost-partnership with Nintendo just convinced Philips to sell it as a game console, and it also explains how they got the rights to produce some Zelda and Mario games. The fact is, the CD-i was simply not designed for games, and this shows on its modest game library.
Similarly to the 3DO, Philips also licensed the CD-i standard to other hardware manufacturers.
The list
| Box Art | Title | Genre | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
|
The Apprentice | Platformer | A vertically scrolling platformer with some pretty good graphics. |
|
Burn:Cycle | Adventure | A trippy, futuristic point and click adventure with digitized actors and pre-rendered environments. Even if you dislike the game, the production values were pretty high for the time. |
 
|
Link: The Faces of Evil Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon |
RPG/Action | These two games have gotten quite a bad reputation due to the proliferation of YouTube Poop, and very divisive opinions. While the Zelda fanboys absolutely hate them (even though the vast majority of them never ever played the game and were only exposed to them via YTP), most everyone else simply ignore them while a few will defend them to death. As far as the CD-i goes, however, they are most likely the best games on the system, a mix of action-RPG platforming in the vein of Zelda II, but better executed. They have the most hilariously atrocious cutscenes in the history of gaming, but beyond that there's nothing actually horrible about the games at all (though they're definitely not amazing, they're not the pieces of trash everyone claims). |
|
Mutant Rampage: BodySlam | Beat 'em up | A competent, well-made brawler with hilariously corny cartoon cutscenes and even some mild nudity. |
Videos
20 Games That Defined The Philips CD-i