Philips CDI

The CD-i or Compact Disc Interactive is the name of an interactive multimedia CD player developed and marketed by Royal Philips Electronics N.V. CD-i also refers to the multimedia Compact Disc standard utilized by the CD-i console, also known as Green Book, which was co-developed by Philips and Sony in 1986. The first Philips CD-i player, released in 1991 and initially priced around USD $400, was capable of playing interactive CD-i discs, Audio CDs, CD+G (CD+Graphics), Karaoke CDs, and Video CDs (VCDs), though the last required an optional "Digital Video Card" to provide MPEG-1 decoding.

Early software releases in the CD-i format focused heavily on educational and self-improvement titles, with only a handful of video games, many of them adaptations of board games like "Connect Four". The most popular games for the system were The 7th Guest and Burn: Cycle. Later attempts to develop a foothold in the games market were rendered irrelevant by the arrival of cheaper and more powerful consoles, such as the Sony PlayStation. CD-i is noted for the release of several spinoffs of popular Nintendo video games featuring characters typically seen only on Nintendo consoles, although those games were not developed by Nintendo.

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Hotel Mario was a puzzle game that featured Super Mario Bros. characters and three Legend of Zelda games were released: Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and Zelda's Adventure. Nintendo and Philips had secured an agreement to co-develop a CD-ROM enhancement for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and Philips was contractually allowed to continue using Nintendo characters after the deal fell through.

Although extensively marketed by Philips, consumer interest in CD-i titles remained low. By 1994, sales of CD-i systems had begun to slow, and in 1998 the product line was dropped. With the home market exhausted, Philips tried with little success to position the technology as a tool for kiosks and industrial multimedia.

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