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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
