It came from eBay: Philips CD-i

by Jasmine Maleficent Rea, BITMOB STAFF

Sunday, September 18, 2011

It's amazing that Nintendo ever let any of their precious franchises leave their hands. But in the early '90s, they courted the idea of adding a CD attachment to the SNES. They reached out to electronics manufacturer Philips for the project, but ultimately decided against it.

Even though Philips wasn't making hardware for Nintendo, they did secure the license to create software featuring the gaming giant's characters. The resulting titles were dreadful, largely because the developers had absolutely no budget and very little help.

You could get your own Philips CD-i for a mere $400! With it you'll get Zelda: the Wand of Gamelon, Super Mario's Wacky Worlds, and a bunch of other way-less-interesting items.

CD-i

You can follow the auction here.

Tags: Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, Super Mario's Wacky Worlds

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Ed Grabowski

September 18, 2011

My God, have you ever seen the videos of the Zelda games made for this? Jeez, I researched this situation a lot in my Freshman year of college all those years ago for a paper. I found it facinating how this all went down and how Nintendo did this to themselves. I hope they fired their lawyers after that travesty for writing up a pretty terrible contract.

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Chris Winters

September 20, 2011

There aren't many systems which, in my view, are worse than the Philips CD-i. I have a CD-i 205 which I found in a car boot sale, and snagged for about £40 (back when players were about £90 on eBay -- so I got a good deal). I haven't played the Zelda games for it yet, but I did get hold of a disc image for Super Mario's Wacky Worlds (it was never commercially released, and all that exists is a prototype), and it's the most god awful piece of crap I've ever played. Really, I'm sure Nintendo were very relieved when Philips decided to can the system, because it was terrible.

In fact, the only two systems I think which were worse than the CD-i was the Sega 32x, just for the absurdness of it (the games on it weren't anywhere near as bad, so I hear) and the Atari Jaguar CD, which is the worst piece of crap I've ever seen in my life. I've been looking for an affordable (and working) Jaguar CD attachment for years, but I can't find one that my wallet likes.