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The Philips CD-i and one of Nintendo's Biggest Mistakes!
Nintendo are the age old company who, from time to time, make a few hiccups. They don't happen often but when they do they can bring the company's name down like with the release of the Virtual Boy or, more recently, the poor sales of the WiiU. Nintendo crushed the competition once they entered our homes in the form of the Famicom and NES, but what about when they made their own competition? The development of the PlayStation was one example, the other was the Philips CD-i, but all's not lost for Nintendo as this console flopped, and hard!
Nintendo were working with Sony to make a disc drive for the SNES, both deals, however, went sour. On Philips side Nintendo lost faith in their ability but they gave Philips the rights to some of their biggest franchises when theyb did work together. We've already looked at one of these: Hotel Mario but from this deal came three horrendous Zelda games that we'll look at later, but it seems interesting that Sony didn't get the same deal (that's something we'll tackle later though). Luckily for Nintendo their lost faith was justified, especially with these games, as the CD-i went on to be one of the poorest performing consoles ever made! It also went on to hold one of the worst library of games for any system too!
Philips, Sony and Magnavox began work on the Philips CD-i way back in 1984 with Nintendo initially having faith in the project for the SNES. Imagine Sony, Nintendo and, at the time giant, Magnavox all working together to craft a masterpiece of the gaming world! Although Nintendo backed out Sony, Magnavox and Philips eventually released the "Green Book" (the CD-i) in 1991, the same year as the SNES and four years before Sony would make a console. The Philips Compact Disc Interactive was an interactive CD console whose library consisted much of Museum Tours, Encyclopaedias and, of course games. This was truly the learning console, the SNES would rot your brain as fly endlessly in another dimension in Star Fox whilst the CD-i was out to teach people. In the days before the internet why not take a textbook and make it more fun? However, the CD-i was doomed before it even hit the shelves! The launch price was $700! As context the SNES was released the same year and was about $500 cheaper! What would you rather get? An educational console with a mediocre library of games or a console with hugely famous titles like Super Mario World or the hugely famous and popular Chrono Trigger?
As the age of the internet ushered in the CD-i adapted to survive, this console was learning on its own to support internet services! The console was one of the first consoles to support web browsing and online play! You could access E-mails on the thing! It was taking huge strides into uncharted waters, but at the same time it seemed to be changing, going from home console to affordable computer! When we talked about art on the Commodore 64 I mentioned how hugely expensive home computers were back in 1982, by the mid-1990s powerful computers were still very expensive. The CD-i offered an alternative without the need for expenses such as mouses, keyboards and floppy drives. They held similar functions for both consoles and computers, all for the low, low price of $700! It's curious, they failed despite offering huge alternatives, education, action, home PCs and the list goes on for what this thing offered!
Philips planned to discontinue the CD-i in 1996 but the console survived until 1998 and ended up costing Philips billions of dollars. The controllers were terrible, the games appealed to very few people and hardly anyone bought the system. In the 7 years the console survived it made it from Japan, to North America and was one of the few smaller consoles to make it to Europe. Philips, Sony and Magnavox made a stab at innovation and failed, as many have before. Innovation is a hard thing to get right, consoles that a born from a gimmick quite often fail, look at Nintendo, they made a name for themselves with the NES and SNES and then they released the Virtual Boy. If they did this firsst it's highly doubtful that Nintendo would have survived the failure. The company survived but their console became infamous, mainly because of the games, but we'll point fingers at those another day...
