CD-i

Philips CD-i · 1991–1998

Philips's interactive-multimedia gamble — a CD-i player pitched in 1991 as an everything box for education, music and games, and remembered almost entirely for the games it should never have had. The deal that let Philips make Zelda and Mario titles produced a clutch of notoriously poor licensed games that have become cult collectibles precisely because of their infamy. Beyond those, the library is a strange archive of FMV adventures, edutainment and early-CD experiments. The CD-i is collected for its curiosity value and for a handful of genuinely scarce releases, a platform whose grails are famous for being bad rather than good.