Philips CD-i

The Compact Disc Interactive, launched by Philips in late 1991, was never really meant to be a game console. It was conceived as an all-purpose living-room multimedia player — a single box for interactive encyclopedias, music, educational software, photo CDs, movies, and, incidentally, games. Backed by a formal industry standard and Philips' considerable electronics muscle, it was pitched to families as the sophisticated, wholesome future of home computing, priced accordingly at hundreds of dollars.

Almost nothing about that vision landed. The interface was clumsy, the device expensive, its software library scattered and dull, and the very breadth of its ambition left it excelling at nothing. Consumers didn't understand what it was for, and the games — its most consumer-facing use — were largely poor, dominated by sluggish point-and-click titles and the FMV interactive movies then in vogue.

The CD-i's peculiar place in history stems from a business deal. Philips had partnered with Nintendo on an abortive SNES CD add-on, and when that collaboration collapsed, Philips retained the right to use several Nintendo characters. The result was a clutch of infamous titles: Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda's Adventure, plus the Mario-themed Hotel Mario. Made without Nintendo's involvement and defined by stilted animated cutscenes and awkward play, they have become legendary as some of the oddest, most derided uses of beloved franchises — endlessly resurfaced in internet culture decades later.

Commercially the CD-i was a disaster. Despite years of marketing and repeated repositioning, it never found an audience, and Philips is estimated to have lost on the order of a billion dollars before quietly discontinuing it in 1998.

Its legacy is almost entirely as a cautionary tale and a cult curiosity. The CD-i demonstrated that a technically ambitious, well-funded platform can fail utterly without a clear purpose or compelling software, and that a machine can achieve a strange immortality for exactly the reasons its makers would least have wanted. Today it is remembered less as the multimedia revolution Philips promised than as the home of gaming's most bizarre licensed misfires.