
The History of the Philips CD-I, Failed PlayStation Ancestor - tosh
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-history-of-the-philips-cdi-failed-playstation-ancestor
======
bsenftner
I was one of the lead developers at Philips Interactive Media. To be fair,
where the article focuses on video games, the CD-I player was never intended
to be a game machine. At the time, Philips was betting that encyclopedias,
educational and subscription publications would be on discs. They were betting
that the network speed and general public adoption of the Internet was going
to be slower, with a disc based interactive media period. They underestimated
the advance of network speeds as well as the public's willingness to wait for
the network. A lot of the CD-I development was centered around the consumer /
end-user never having to wait, which was accomplished through a special real
time media file format that effectively turned the disc into a single 740 MB
file.

It was not until the reality of CD-I players being sold that the necessity for
games and the zero interest in educational media became clear. At the time,
digital media itself was new, and the idea of a dedicated digital disc based
encyclopedia / magazine made sense.

~~~
rconti
This takes me back, and points out something people today probably don't fully
appreciate.

In 1993, Edutainment _was_ the promise of computers. We had an old XT that my
sister took to college that fall, and we were shopping for a 486. Encarta and
National Geographic CD-ROM based titles were everywhere. Every demo in every
computer store let you play with these seemingly-limitless repositories of
information. It was mind-blowing -- complete with short postage stamp videos
for select subjects!

It would be fascinating to look back at all of the titles available, but rich
multimedia was finally here, and it died as quickly as it had arrived, as
people moved to AOL, CompuServe, and the Internet instead.

~~~
cpitman
I sunk a ton of time into Encarta as a kid. In some ways, it still seems
superior to Wikipedia.

~~~
smacktoward
Microsoft's CD-based movie encyclopedia product, Cinemania
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cinemania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cinemania)),
was similarly excellent. In terms of presentation, Cinemania 97 was far
superior to IMDB as it is 20 years later.

~~~
Keyframe
I completely forgot about that, you brought some great memories! It really
seems like those curated educational/reference/edutainment(?) products were,
in some ways, better than interwebz we have today. Microsoft was really good
at that game. Even on the internet. I wonder what they're up to now, will have
to check out. There was this site they did, I think as a part of demonstration
of terraserver, where they made an online sky map with deep zoom
functionality. It was impressive at the time. Googling turns out nothing -
maybe I should try with Bing.

However, english wikipedia is probably one of the most important, if not THE
most important invention internet has brought us. Such a wealth of information
and all as a free access. I've dreamt of such thing in our future back then,
and now we have it.

------
lbeltrame
Around the same time there was another experiment, from Commodore instead,
that didn't turn up that well either, the CDTV:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV)

I remember seeing that in a store or two back in the days.

~~~
baobrien
Commodore also had the Amiga CD32 a few years later. I got my hands on a few
CD32 games in a haul of amiga stuff.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32)

~~~
vidarh
Commodore tried doing "consoles" based on their computers over and over.

The CD32 was a successor of sorts of the CDTV[1], which was based on the Amiga
500 (where CD32 was pretty much - with some minor other changes - an Amiga
1200 equivalent).

But Commodore had also previously tried to launch the cartridge based
Commodore MAX Machine[2] (Ultimax, VC-10) and the C64GS [3]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_MAX_Machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_MAX_Machine)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_Games_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_Games_System)

~~~
Phrodo_00
It made sense, given that Atari was doing the same a few years prior.

------
Tiktaalik
Kind of a weird title. The SNES CD was the Playstation ancestor. The CD-i was
a device made independently that Nintendo partnered with after they dumped
Sony.

Spurned by Nintendo, Sony took their SNES CD tech and created the Playstation
from it.

~~~
bsamuels
Nintendo did more than just dump Sony, they humiliated them.

Originally, Sony was supposed to be Nintendo's partner for the CD-i machine.
Nintendo went behind Sony's back and partnered with Phillips.

At the summer 1991 CES when Sony was expecting the CD-i machine and their
partnership with Nintendo to be announced, Nintendo announced the product with
Phillips as their partner.

I can't help but wonder how much animosity towards Nintendo contributed
towards the development of the Playstation 1.

~~~
digi_owl
Supposedly that partnership lead to the only time, until recently, where
Nintendo characters appeared outside of a Nintendo system.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-
i_games_from_The_Legend_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-
i_games_from_The_Legend_of_Zelda_series)

~~~
PostOnce
there were a few exceptions in the early days when they first had their own
consoles
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.#Ports](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.#Ports)

and of course before they had consoles:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong_(video_game)#Licen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong_\(video_game\)#Licensing_and_ports)

------
matty22
We still have an operational CD-i in my parent's house. We played the heck out
of it back in the day. We did own Link: The Faces of Evil, but it was insanely
difficult as a kid. Even recently when I've popped it in, the controls are
just terrible. A few of the games we played a lot of were The Wacky World of
Miniature Golf (narrated by Eugene Levy), Cartoon Carnival, and Mystic Midway:
Rest in Pieces.

------
presidentender
We had one of these! I fondly remember playing the CDi port of "Defender of
the Crown" and a clever crossword game named "Textiles."

Philips also had the rights to Nintendo's characters for a few games, which
led to the strange "Hotel Mario," in which the victory condition was to shut
all the doors in a hotel. It's unfortunate that the cutscenes are so cringey -
the game itself was enjoyable, and the graphics and soundtrack were charming.

I believe we had some Encyclopedia software, too, but in retrospect the UX of
paper was much better than trying to navigate a 90s wikipedia with what
amounted to a TV remote.

~~~
bsenftner
The guy that wrote "Hotel Mario" \- not the cut scenes, but the game - was a
real guru professional. Watching him code was the first time I ever saw anyone
adding up the op-code and memory access times to design their algorithm.
Everyone at Philips was quite impressed. At bit later a contractor at a game
studio showed Philips an idea called Compiled Sprites that allowed 64+
independent animating entities on screen at once. But that innovation came too
late, as the brain drain at Philips was already well underway. CD-I was dying
just when a way to make the games they needed appeared, but everyone was
already mid-job hop.

~~~
JonathanMerklin
Apologies for my ignorance, but I'd like to ask if you (or anyone) could
elaborate on that "adding up the op-code and memory access times to design
their algorithm" bit. I understand what op-codes are, what memory access times
are, and have an algorithm design knowledge expected out of "3.5 years of
CS+Math undergraduate education, relevant interview prep, and a year and a
half working in the field doing generic web work", but I'm not sure I'm
wrapping my head around that part. Do you mean that he used those timings to
derive an output value for the cost function for higher-level parts of the
algorithms he was using? If you can recall any specifics that aren't a trade
secret, I'd love to hear it for the sake of my own learning.

~~~
bsenftner
We knew the memory read/write times for the different types of RAM in the
system, as well as the machine language op code times for all the operations
necessary to copy memory from one type of memory to another, with/without
color-keyed transparency. The CD-I system provided triggers for when a given
scan line was displayed, so with careful timing one could write code with the
knowledge that there is time to perform some ambitious calculation. For
example, to just copy a block of memory is one thing, but between different
types of memory and the timings are different. Now add in the real world
necessity of copy with color-key transparency, meaning you need to look into
the memory you want to overwrite to choose if the overwrite is going to
happen. That has a whole separate set of timings. Combine that with hybrid
logic that figures out where dumb block copies and smarter color-key
transparency timings trade off, and you have a process segmentation.

~~~
JonathanMerklin
That was a good explanation. Thank you!

------
wernsey
The Digital Antiquarian wrote an extensive history of the Philips CD-i
[https://www.filfre.net/2016/09/a-slow-motion-
revolution/](https://www.filfre.net/2016/09/a-slow-motion-revolution/)

In a nutshell: Philips developed CD-i, but then DVI was invented which solved
the problem of decompressing . Philips' attempts to catch up with DVI then
caused CD-i to be delayed time and again.

So by the early nineties there was still no practical way to take advantage of
the massive storage space offered by compact disks, so Microsoft stepped in
and led the effort to standardize CD-ROM and the CD-i was left behind as an
odd "what could've been".

I can't say I have much sympathy for Philips after reading about the Baer
patent in another article on that blog [https://www.filfre.net/2017/01/a-time-
of-endings-part-3-medi...](https://www.filfre.net/2017/01/a-time-of-endings-
part-3-mediagenic-or-the-patent-from-hell/) . Philips behaved in a way that
might be considered patent trolling today because they had a patent on
basically "any videogame console" that they used against all the other
players, despite not really competing in that market themselves.

------
kposehn
I remember once playing the CD-I at CES in 1992 (maybe ‘93), well before the
days of E3. This was also the same conference where I saw a preview demo of
the Sega CD (in retrospect the demo was a complete hoax).

But, what stuck with me most was the potential capability of CD based game
systems to have much more immersive environments. It seemed imminent that we
would go from 2D sprite based games to something much more complex, and it was
absolutely fascinating at the time.

~~~
astura
Why was the Sega CD demo a hoax?

~~~
wcfields
Could have just been a laser disc replaying rendered footage, or a Sega with a
custom made cartridge playing back a demo "video"

~~~
kposehn
Pretty much. Not sure of the format, but it wasn’t done with the Sega CD

~~~
codesushi42
Hilarious, thanks for the anecdote! Sounds like typical 90s Sega for sure. For
instance, remember the VR headset demo that was nothing but canned promo reel?

------
jejones3141
CD-I was sadly underpowered; the Signetics 68070 was like a 68000 but slower,
because it had one less ALU--if only it had a 68020 at the very least. The
article doesn't mention some of the better games (e.g. Burn:Cycle) or
interesting experiments (the CD-I version of Todd Rundgren's _No World
Order_), though they too were constrained by the hardware.

------
js2
Semi-related was the Kodak Photo CD which was CD-i compatible:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_CD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_CD)

------
danielhlockard
I'm a volunteer for Zeldathon (not going to link it, you can google it), and
we have multiple players that still play these games, and some that have
gotten world records in them. It's wild that A) they've held up this long and
B) how popular they are in our little community. I think we had 3 or 4 CD-i's
at the last marathon I attended.

~~~
VectorLock
If you think about it more than 20% of the Zelda games for set-top consoles
came out on CD-I.

------
digi_owl
In a sense, the introduction of the CD-ROM was the ultimate example of an
industry going gaga over some new tech.

Not only did we have the likes of the CD-I, we also had games that tried to
make use of full motion video to either replace or supplement computer
graphics. The results were more often than not poor.

------
omginternets
Christ, I remember this thing.

For whatever reason, there are two games that really stuck with me:

\- [https://youtu.be/KoCFToFstSY](https://youtu.be/KoCFToFstSY)

\- [https://youtu.be/VM0sBhZbXS0](https://youtu.be/VM0sBhZbXS0)

CD-I was way ahead of its time.

------
helipad
A couple of YouTube videos deep I found Crime Control 2, a live action video
game. Before 3D graphics got good, I was sure as a kid they were the future.

The X-Files PC game that came on seven discs, some game I played at Euro
Disney where you could take penalties against a goalkeeper.

------
RmDen
See also Wondery's Business Wars Nintendo vs Sony podcast series
[https://wondery.com/shows/business-wars/](https://wondery.com/shows/business-
wars/)

~~~
Keyframe
I will never miss the opportunity to recommend "Game Over" book here, as I did
many times so far.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Over_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Over_\(book\))
It reads like a thriller and is a great read for everyone - especially
entrepreneurs.

------
murph-almighty
I would strongly recommend AVGN's series on this console- it's an amusing,
mostly Legend-Of-Zelda-focused look at what a weird console this was.

------
eddof13
Zombie Dinos from Planet Zeltoid, that is all. It's greatness will never be
equaled.

------
reaperducer
Found one of these at Goodwill last month. No way to test if it worked,
though. Pass.

~~~
BonesJustice
There might still be a few of them gathering dust in Goodwill locations around
Knoxville. That's where Philips' North America HQ was in the early '90s, and
at least two of our CD-I units ended up there.

