Philips CD-i Demonstration Discs

[Steve W]

I found a bunch of these in a thrift a few years back, and I was wondering if anyone had some idea of how rare these things are. I picked up a few of them, including Zelda: Wand of Gamelon (which I can't find to take a photo of right now). Zelda was a dark green label. I've seen some of these demo discs around with dark green labels, fluorescent red labels, and plain white. I've come across these things several times in the past, almost as many times as I've seen regular release discs. Does anyone have a guess at their rarity? By the way, I looked up a release list and National Parks and Jonah weren't on it. It really makes me curious about these things. I'm not interested in selling them, I'd just like to know more about them.

[Bojay1997]

Unfortunately, these are almost as common as the regular CD-i releases. Philips gave their reps literally spools of these things to hand out to retailers for demo stations. The demo discs were typically white label like these or red or sometimes other colors depending on the time period. There are some rarer discs out there with actual prototypes and test discs which were used by Philips internally and they tend to have earlier versions of the games on them. Both Jonah (The Story of Jonah) and National Parks (A National Parks Tour) were released in the US and worldwide. They aren't really games which is why a lot of lists you found won't list them. They typically sell for $5-$7 loose and more if you have the printed instructions and they are not scratched since many of these were thrown around by the retailers that got them. The Zelda games and Hotel Mario tend to go for more, but only the last of the Zelda trilogy is a hard to find demo disc. The other two are dirt common.

[Steve W]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Oh well, they're a nice little find to have in my collection. Were they mostly full release games or were they sometimes 'work in progress' titles? It'd be fascinating to discover incomplete or unpublished levels in the game titles. For example, in the Zelda game, I got to a point where I couldn't progress any further. I don't know if it's because the game was designed by brain-damaged monkeys with development kits, or maybe it's because the background and foreground is so hard to tell apart I couldn't figure out where else to go. It could be that the game just sucked outright.

[Bojay1997]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Oh well, they're a nice little find to have in my collection. Were they mostly full release games or were they sometimes 'work in progress' titles? It'd be fascinating to discover incomplete or unpublished levels in the game titles. For example, in the Zelda game, I got to a point where I couldn't progress any further. I don't know if it's because the game was designed by brain-damaged monkeys with development kits, or maybe it's because the background and foreground is so hard to tell apart I couldn't figure out where else to go. It could be that the game just sucked outright.

All of the demo discs I am aware of were full versions of the game. The test discs or work in progress discs often had unfinished versions, but those are generally more obvious as they say version X.X right on the cover.