I demonstrated the CD-I at an Interactive Universe. After playing the games to prepare for the demos, I only half heartedly pushed it to people, because I thought it was so bad. Another of the demo people was gung ho. She'd interrupt me to hard sell the to the people I was talking to. She wasn't above lying about things in order to make a sale. I finally told her to stay away from me, and don't talk to people I was talking to.
I got one of these when they first came out! For $299!!! And the keyboard. $69 And the mouse. $59 And game pad controller. $49 And the $200 video expansion pack, so I could play Philips version of DVDs. And the $280 Online kit, so I could cruise the interwebs, @ 14.4k dial up... And 20+ disks, at the average cost of $45 per disc... Ones I remember was Wacky World of Golf, Mickey Rooney Horse Racing, Zelda, Name That Tune, Mad Dog McCree, Dragons Lair, No World Order, Myst, *did I happen to say, I had over 20?* Power Hitter (YUCK!!!) Numerology, The 7th Guest, Burn Cycle, Space Ace, Tetris, Voyeur, *ah yes, Voyeur...* etc, etc... I did like 7th Guest, Myst, and Burn Cycle was interesting. Ah 90s... *I want my money back!!!* Oh, and I remember Incredible Universe, in SLC, UT. It was HUGE!!! I got mine from a local furniture store, called RC Willey..
MAH BOI, this strip poker is what all true warriors strive for! After you've sold all the clothing in Hyrule, then we can talk about having enough rupees! Take him to dinner!
My biggest question is why did Philips invent the CD-I format when CD-ROM did the same job except arguably better since it wasn't tied down to a specific piece of hardware?
@@supernintendo182 Philips designed the CD-I to be entirely proprietary. Problem is, everything was so short sided and idiotic in its overall execution, that the whole thing ended up literally sealing the fate of Video CD in the US and Europe.
A very cool review of the CD-i. TY Ben. I didn't own a computer back then (I owned a word processor.) So the idea of an all-in-one system that could play games, had lots of educational titles and could play digital video was very appealing to me. I was a very early adopter. So early that soon after I sent in my warranty card to Philips (I believe their US HQ was in Knoxville, TN) I got a call from a video production company in Portland, OR inviting me to come and make one of those testimonials like the ones you show here. Unfortunately my video wasn't chosen but Philips did agree to give me a credit for a bunch of CD-i accessories. The trackball was one of my first accessories. By 1992 I was employed at a stereo store where we sold CD-i. Sales were anemic at best and I was the resident 'expert'. Philips would send a 'product detailer' out to our store every now and then and I would acquire still more titles due to my interest. I owned the CD-i 910 with the digital video cartridge. The CD-i 910 was made in Belgium. I took it apart to look at the chips and it had the most advanced Philips D/A converter available (the so called 'Q' class.) So it became my primary CD player. When the store I worked at went broke in 1995 I also acquired a CD-i 220 at a bargain price. The 220 was the best CD-i player ever made. A few years ago I sold off all of the old junk I had gathered in my living room and the CD-i system was part of that purge. I had lots of discs marked 'for store demo only'. My favorites were Mystic Midway-Rest in Pieces (hey watch it! - argh!), Axis and Allies, Defender of the crown and Battleship. I found a local copier company that was convinced that Photo CD would be the professional choice. They spent a huge amount of money on the hardware to produce these. As a was to test their equipment I got hundreds of my slides converted for free and these could also be played on the CD-i. There was even a CD-i magazine printed in the UK. One thing I'll say for my CD-i player was that it very rarely crashed (unlike my Windows 95 computer.)
Here's my CD-i testimonial: The CD-i was truly atrocious in every retrospective. Back in 1993, my Mom worked for Venture, and because of that, sales Reps. were allowed to test run Electronics and certain TV apparatuses. They could take one home for up to 3 days or just demo it inside the employee office. Because I was 10, and because I had a 5 year old brother, She would often take me and him into the office on Fridays. That's where we got to test demo new games or products. During this time, I played alot of Sega CD with games like Sewer Shark,Final Fight,Time Gal. It was around Mid October '93(Friday the 22nd I believe) when I first saw CD-i on display. It was the old,original Model 1 CD Changer tray SKU with the terrible Analog Remote Controller. And the new games that had just come out were the Zelda games,Mario's Fun With Letters, and some STUPID FMV Point and Click Adventure game that was supposed to be for "Adults" called "Voyeur". With the lack of a rating system in '93, nobody expected that game had mature content. I played Both Zelda games,the really terrible Mario edutainment spelling game, The New Age Tetris, and even the moronic "Voyeur". Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon looked the same,played the same and sounded the same: Appalling. Plus the horrendously designed Remote, made gameplay more frustrating and un-fun for me. The thumb stick felt stiff and clunky, the trigger/command system was limited to just 2 buttons to use which since the crappy ass Remote was so poorly designed, were crowded up all under the thumb stick at the top of the Controller, the games felt choppy and sloppy in their control mechanism.. I can describe Mario's Fun With Letter with one short sentence: It was the first game I actually shut off after three minutes. I got irritated by the constant lecture interruptions EVERY single minute telling me how to play the damn game. New Age Tetris Sucked. It got boring super quick. It lacked charm. As for Voyeur, it was stupid,contrived,boring,phoned in ,and just overall a poorly designed FMV cash grab. There was nothing ADULT or pornographic in any way. Just Women wearing racy clothes or something. Also the design and quality of CD-i(especially the non top loading 1st party CD Changer models) was notoriously horrid. Loading times and disc speed was shoddy and sluggish, Some discs would often crash or freeze randomly for no reason at all.(Even BRAND spanking new discs). Drives would often have mechanical failure or severe lens problems, but what really killed the whole thing was its controllers: Some of, if not the WORST video game controllers in history! The Remote was godawful. The SNES like joysticks were even WORSE(Stiff,very clunky Stick with touch buttons that felt spastic and broken) and the REALLY unbalanced Hand Paddle. CD-i sucked horribly. It failed for a reason.
Given that, all anyone talks about whenever CD-i comes up in conversation is the Mario and Zelda games, it's nice to see some of the other stuff on there
Growing up, the school I attended became "proud" owners of the CD-i. Their intentions with it were sound as a way to get students to interact with the material, but the software was so shit, I don't recall us using them past a months time. The teachers struggled so much with the remotes and controlling the software that the VCR quickly became the norm again.
25:35 The sudden speed-up and the wiggle dance just slays me, but the fucking belt buckle sheen at the end is what tops it. I just can't deal. I've laughed so much I nearly shit myself.
There's Tons of versions of the CD-I even a expensive one that's on a exlusive branded TV from europe that's still rare today. there are versions that include the consumer and business ones but the other ones not mentioned in the video is a Version of the CD-I that's also a stereo, A Portable CD-I (also from Sony for some Weird reason) and a Philips CD-I TV.
It's a shame that showing a guy getting naked in a strip poker game isn't going to attract a lot of subscribers, because this episode was excellent. I never knew there could be such bizarre things in that console, such as that Laser Lords game, or whatever it's called. That's a lot, lot more than what I expected from a CD-i episode. You're the man, Ben.
Dear Pesky Plumbers, The Koopalings and I have taken over The Mushroom Kingdom. The princess is now a permanent guest at one of my seven Koopa Hotels. I dare you to find her if you can.
i miss my cdi as i can say one thing about it you will only get games like laserlords and other weird exclusives on this machine but replacing the timekeeper battery is a absolute annoyance as its embedded in a ceramic chip. i also had tons of games for this machine including an unusual education game about dinosaurs with puppets from the chiodo bros and the main character is played by liquid snake himself cam clarke, dexter the dino. EDIT: 4:32 is a short sample of that game.
I've never seen a remote that works on RCA style plugs either, plenty that run on those headphone style plugs though, but never RCA. Also, wow, they even managed to make strip poker boring... "I must sell some clothing"
Looks like I'm fir- *blue shell explosion* In all seriousness, Philips's marketing for this... thing was horrible. How much did they have to pay Phil Hartman to star in those commercials?!
Philips lost close to $1 billion on the CDi over its 7 year lifespan (1991-1998). Depending on what source you use, it sold either 570,000 units or just over 1 million units. I'd personally say closer to the latter.
I hope you'll be adding that Todd Rundgren song "No World Order" to the Archive's Greatest Hits list. I'm sort of digging it. Thanks to Ben, I checked out some more of his stuff. He's sort of like a slightly harder version of Donald Fagen at times. He definitely takes a loaded topic (the NWO) and makes it his own. No it's not about a global elite/ one world government. It's about more sex, more comforting...
My driving instructor (in Germany) used a CD-I with video cartridge for instruction media. He had a barcode scanner for it so he could for example scan a sign on a booklet and get the sign on the screen.
Fascinating! I remember the CD-i first appearing in my local COOP 'Living' shop (a sort of socialist department store that used to be really big in Yorkshire and Lancashire) in the very early 90's - so a few years before yourself. That 'Matsushita' is an odd name as well. I have heard it pronounced 'mat-shush-ta' like you, 'mat-shush-EYEta' and as it seems to be in Britain 'Mat-Sue-SHE-Ta' - the problem being no matter which you favour you will ALWAYS be corrected by some snotty little IT-brat!
+morelenmir I was actually surprised that he pronounced Matsushita the way he did because it was actually closer to the standard Japanese pronunciation of the name. Mat-sue-SHE-tah has the highest occurrence in english but is mistaken in the "mat" and having an "a" as in "bat" and in having emphasis on "she." Phonetically it would be mah-tsu-she-tah with no emphasis on any syllable, and more commonly in japan it would said very quickly sounding more like it did in the video as "mah-tsu-shta" with the long "e" (or "i") sound being for most intents and purposes sounding dropped.
I seem to recall a Peter Gabriel album that was interactive. I believe I saw a blip about it on MTV waaaaay back when, so, I could be confusing it with something else. But I think it was some sort of computer addition to the album US where they put you virtually in the studio and you could mess around with the tracks a bit.
The RCA port for the remote is supposed to go with the RCA "Dimensia" television. It's a really, really old precursor to HDMI-CEC -- the thing that lets you use your television remote to adjust the volume on an external receiver or control your Blu-Ray player without any universal remote programming. The more you know, huh?
I actually tested LaserLords (and Alice in Wonderland in non-English). Thanks for making me re-live that that hell. Although, the money-soundbite is "I gotta take a leak". (Which was "effe pissen", in Dutch.)
The difference between CD-I and the playstation was that CD-I lackeda central focus as to what it wanted to be, it didn't really excel at any particular field. While the original playstation did play CD's it was probably more of a by product of the main format being cd's even earlier cd format gaming systems like the sega cd were also capable of playing cd's. Same with the dvd capabilites of the PS2, the main format was DVD's and the hardware could handle dvd quality video playback so there was no reason to not do it really, even if it is a gaming system. If only nintendo had followed this mentality, there is no reson not to allow DVD or CD playback. The homebrew scene for wii has done it, so it proves that the hardware is capable, but nintendo just isn't willing because they are too set in their ways. TL;DR in CD-i was a all in one device with no focus. Playstation was gaming console that had extra features.
Deadagent Nintendo didn't want to pay the royalty fees needed to allow CD and DVD playback. I'm not sure if they pay royalty fees because of the drive itself since Wii discs are similar to DVDs. Hey, gotta save money somehow. And I'm pretty sure the PS2 being capable of playing DVDs out of the box was part of the plan all along. Quite a lot of people bought the system for the games and the movie playback (myself included) and it helped more folks get into buying DVDs instead of tapes. The Xbox needed the remote and the dongle despite being fully capable of playing discs... and if the Dreamcast had only gone with DVDs then maybe history would've been a little different. (But not much, piracy would've still killed the thing. Probably a bit earlier.)
+Deadagent Sounds about right. In fact, I'm willing to bet one of the fastest way to kill a consumer electronic device is to try and make it do everything. Customers, I think, don't want an all-in-one machine, they like being able to pick and choose the devices they want and customize them from there. And then, of course, it's better to whole-ass one thing instead of half-ass ten, and I think you're right that Sony recognized that.
Oh, I forgot! That remote port on the back, I think that was for an infrared sensor / receiver which would plug into the port, and you'd glue or tape the other end somewhere like the side of your TV, so you don't have to aim the remote directly at the device.
@@engineergaming5566 Long story short in the 90s it started as a book series, Had 2 plays, Had at least 2 different versions of the show worked on before it became a full on series in the 2000s
There were a few other good titles for the system: (1) Voyer, (2) The 7th Guest (one of the knocks about the game that it was too smooth), (3) Tetris, and (4) Dimo's Quest. Unfortunately, there were also a number of not-good titles. For me, one of the worst was "Link: Faces of Evil" (I got stuck in the game where I was trapped at the bottom of pit, I couldn't get out it, I couldn't kill the enemy, and all I could do was leap around).
T_T My greatest regret was throwing away my CD-I. I had both Zelda games, and a Dracula adventure game that was AMAZING and I can find NO INFO ANYWHERE on. Also some underwater adventure disc that occupies 99% of my childhood memories. No, seriously, I must have played that game 20 hours a day for an entire summer. It was the only game I had, until I got the Dracula one. Now, they are worth more than weapons grade nuke stuff. Edit: Wait, 3 Zelda games? O_O
I have the CD-i with mpeg card and only thing i like about it is how it looks on my rack. For an early console it looks nice but thats about it. I like the vcd feature but almost anything can play them now so its just a nice historic piece on my shelf.
FYI, The "RCA remote" is a way to connect Philips units which then can be controlled with a single remote. ~25 years ago we had the cheapest Philips "Hi-Fi" all-in-one: a casette deck, a radio and an LP player (all in one box), plus a CD player separately, and guess what, the CD player was connected to the main unit with exactly this RCA-type cable... and the whole system had a single remote, and the receiver was in the main unit.
Ben, why didn't you show off Mad Dog McCree? I was hoping to see you try to play it but fail because of that awful controller. :p And since you said you already owned it (despite sending you a copy), I figured you'd mention it. That golf game... I first heard of it over 10 years ago while I was visiting some (then) friends in the US. Stroke Limit became a joke during my time there. And I once found like twenty different educational games for the system at one of my usual flea market places... except they wanted five bucks each because they thought they were games. Yeah... no, heh. :(
+64PageSpecial That's actually White Christmas, with Irving Berlin, Rosemary Clooney, and Danny Kaye. The prologue involved the main male characters fighting in the army together before they went into show business. And to my memory, no it doesn't.
I was wondering where that first clip in Name That Tune came from, until I finally realized......it was sampled by Wayne Smith on Take A Trip from the Youthman Skanking LP, back when he was still playing dub before the whole Sleng Teng riddim took off
CD-i was a desperate Pyramid Scheme Philips had starting developing back in the latter 80s that came out 3-4 years too late. It probably would have caught on, had it been released in 1988 instead of 1991. The "Interactive" and "Edutainment" or Entertainment shit were just tacked on gimmicks designed to con naive consumers into paying for the ridiculous $700 price point. Plus extra, "useful" accessories for the "Actual Entertainment". CD-i imploded rather badly, by 1996, Philips lost $2 billion in budget shortfalls. Plus, the Start Up BIOS would often glitch up and freeze. You know you have a BAD console, when the BIOS FAILS randomly shutting down the assembly program.
I remember Incredible Universe opening here in late 1994 and recall seeing these there along with the Atari Jaguar on demo. The place was cool for previewing systems and other tech, but was so overpriced I started calling it Incredible Ripoff. I'm pretty sure this was the early days of showrooming, where people would check out stuff here, then go buy it somewhere else for less money.
Actually your correct. Showrooming was a well know popular practice from about 1985 until about 1997. Where Retailers and Electronic Manufacturers would set up a Exhibit sales Area Booth in a large Dept Store or Electronics Shop like Circuit City, full of new gadgets and Electronics(Mostly Overpriced and Profiteered.) Your experience was actually the tail end of the ShowRooming era. It ended around '97. I saw quite alot of ShowRooming at the Venture my Mom worked for during mid 1993(3DO and CD-i) and at K Mart during 1986-87(Lots of VCRs and TVs).
The CD-I is still considered one of the worst video game consoles ever made. How much of that reputation is deserved I'm not sure, because I've never owned one.
It was an okay system but had a number of issues. One of the worst was the controller, which was horrible for playing games (I ended up buying a wired controller that was similar to the NES controller and that greatly improved things). The other issue was that it tried to do it all (video games, entertainment, movies, music) and it didn't have a good focus on any of them.
Im.40. I remember all the rich kids I went to school with had damn near all the weird game consoles and satellite TV with xxx... I envied those fuckers...I had the "little known at the time" better mainstream consoles, ones we realize are " were" better now
The original, pre VCD, CD-I video disks can at least be ripped with PC hardware, through not every cd reader will work (my old, scsi plexwriter 4x does, but I've tried quite a few readers/writers that had trouble with this). The main issue is that those disks use a larger than 2048 byte sector size, 2304 bytes if memory serves me right. Anyway, ripping them involves reading the tracks as data, but with the larger sector size. There used to be a bit of software called tosha that could do this, provided your reader/writer could as well, and worked with that software. And hence, I have a nice rip of the few CD-I video titles I own, and the ability to play those. I can't be bothered with a CD-I player, I already have way more AV equipment than makes sense, including lots of obsolete stuff (the bathroom and the hallway behind the front door are the only rooms in my house without a good amplifier, speakers and record player (and some kind of network connected digital media player)..
The cd-i back in the day had a lot of potential. the chips inside could bring a pc experience to peoples televisions. Gaming could have really leveraged the internal chipset. However, it didnt happen. I always rooted for the CD-i but could never afford it... i wanted one ... but the price....
