Special on a technological meteor worth rediscovering

It is an incontrovertible law in the world of stories, told in cinema or in novels, we know it well, but it also fits perfectly in the field of what we can call computer archaeology, a branch made up of passionate people, often more likely to be in their forties than their thirties.

Scavenging through the past, it is easy to unearth pearls that we risk forgetting as time inexorably passes: this is the case of the Philips Cd-i, a sacred relic belonging to the immense multiverse of technologies developed in the second half of the twentieth century, specifically in 1991.

Come the name suggests, it is a CD player designed by Philips and marketed in the early Nineties, in a reference world where the new compact disc standard was inexorably taking hold: a commercially bold move but at the same time logical, yet the cracks in the operation launched by Philips began right away to weigh on the solidity of the CD-i, unfortunately destined for a noisy fall that still echoes deafeningly today. First of all, the CD-i is neither a console nor a personal computer, but rather one of the first concrete examples of a set-top box: this name refers to a device that enables audiovisual functions that were initially not implemented in the original medium, specific to television sets.

If you feel like it, watch the special episode of Games Collection on the theme...

As a result, the technical performance is minimal, as evidenced by the fact that to enjoy full motion video films (using the famous video CDs, the great-grandparents of “modern” DVDs) it was necessary to have an extra FMV card, without which many games in the Philips catalog simply did not work, effectively rendering the expensive CD-i unusable (400 dollars at the time was no small amount).

To give you an idea of its maximum processing power, the CD-i in its stand-alone version could barely run games like Tetris or little more: an announced failure on the gaming front, unfortunately, especially in a period when arcades and the advent of new home consoles demanded a high standard in terms of performance and available game library, elements in which the CD-i failed to keep up with the times.

We mentioned the CD-i game library: a catalog that at the time could boast of being innovative, deliberately departing from the classic platformers and shooters that were widespread everywhere among arcade machines and emerging home entertainment; a bold choice, but the CD-i interactive films were, in fact, born old-fashioned, potentially interesting but limited both technically and in terms of gameplay depth. You went to the right, you went to the left, you fired your weapon and the game was over, as happened in Dragon’s Lair, a recognized masterpiece that nevertheless could not support the CD-i on its own, let’s admit it.

Avendo had the possibility to try many of the CD-i titles in my association together with Mauro Corbetta (to whom I thank for the technical advice), I can speak up in favor of Philips’ rejected child and state that there were fun and worthwhile games, plenty of them! I mention Thunder in Paradise, a rail shooter starring none other than Hulk Hogan (official spokesperson for the launch game taken from the TV series, but also of the CD-i itself), or the beautiful Mad Dog McCree, a first-person western shooter with the help of two guns to play cooperatively.

Overwhelmed by a world that was rapidly accelerating toward more affordable and user-friendly technologies, the Philips CD-i was finally retired by the gray monolith par excellence, that PlayStation bearer of a hegemony that it was impossible to oppose, and this was not only true for the CD-i, as late-20th-century video game history has taught us.