When we think of the Legend of the Zelda Series, we think of the nostalgic golden cartridge of Ocarina of Time, the magical music from the Lost Woods, the endless hours spent exploring the land of Hyrule in the most recent installment, The Breath of the Wild, and the world filled with exploration and discovery in Skyward sword. Everyone enjoys the nostalgic, caring craftsmanship that is evident in every Zelda release, especially the most recent ones.
Among the many releases in the primary series, one aspect of the Tree of Zelda is among the most neglected and odd: the three CD-i titles. The Legend of Zelda CD-i titles have gained a reputation all their own, gaining a cult following and outselling each of the other three in the trilogy, including a title created by the current developer of the series, Zelda: Twilight Princess. The Legend of Zelda CD-i titles have become cultural icons.
Some people think the phrase ‘Zelda CDI’ is a fan-made joke. Three official Zelda games were released in the span of a year during 1993-1994, and they were not on a Nintendo console. The games were on the Philips CD-i, which is a failed multimedia console. The games are Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda: The Faces of Evil. They are the fringes, the misty or forcibly forgotten, the memoirs of the franchise. This article, while a review, is also a dig. One of the most compelling failures of the industry’s Zelda CDI will be the center of our seven odd curiosities.
Table of Contents
The Tainted Handshake: How Zelda Became Available For CD-i
To understand the Zelda CDI, one must understand the shift in the early 1990s. Nintendo, having just launched the SNES and riding high on the NES, was now with Philips and buying ’89 CD-i prototypes. Phillips made interactive machines for education and entertainment, and Nintendo was licensing its characters to Phillips.
Zelda CDI is a game based on the monumental Zelda and Link video game franchises. Zelda CDII is the most popular video game released in the 1990s. Zelda CDI is a series of internet memes that emerged from online videos. As a result, a massive following for memes based on Zelda CDI games emerged. It should be noted that numerous memes were produced in response to poor-quality videos and games. The popular internet meme “my boy” is based on the Zelda CDI and has gained widespread notoriety. Another widely known meme is “Zelda CDI Games,” which has also gained notoriety throughout the internet.
Zelda CDI is a series of memes inspired by the video game series. The most notable meme is “my boy,” based on Zelda CDI, and it has gained popularity across the internet. The games that produced these memes are now so poor that they cannot even be played, as they no longer exist. The fulminating muse expresses a yearning for the times when poorly constructed video games were made. Games that are now so poorly constructed that they have become memes are those that are now so poorly constructed.
Nintendo probably thought this meant very little for a project on its last legs. For Philips, however, this was a golden ticket. This meant an almost surreal partnership. Nintendo had no creative control. Shigeru Miyamoto, who had the most innovative control over Nintendo games, never got the chance to work on the Zelda CDI titles. He and his team had to watch from the sidelines as companies like Animation Magic created titles that had no opportunity to work with the CDI’s extreme tech shortcomings. This is how Nintendo CDI titles got the lore they were infamous for.
“My Boy!” An Anatomy of a Disaster: Gameplay & Graphics
What even was a CDI Zelda game? The two games were sidescrollers, and while both are infuriating to most, they are often interchangeable. They both have the same controls, where Link (or Zelda in the Wand of Gamelon) moves very slowly and with the precision of a vending machine with a jammed coin slot. Jumping is a drastic decision, and fighting involves stepping back to throw something. The games took advantage of the CD-i’s special feature: full motion video (FMV).
The backgrounds and characters were most often uncompressed video clips that meld into the background of the characters you control. Though visually messy, the games’ backgrounds featured video clips compressed to the point of unrecognizability. The user interface animations were stiff, the colors were crazy, and the art style, though inspired by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, was immensely better. Frames and backgrounds of every Zelda CDI game yelled, “Cheap licensed product!”
Zamusa’s Adventure was more willfully optimistic with an isometric perspective, but had the same bugs. The baffling control scheme was most apparent in the game world. Besides the lack of Nintendo’s core design philosophy that made other titles so good, a common problem across all three games was poor intuitive design.
The presentation of Zelda CDI’s three games was hard to forget, especially the cutscenes. Using self-made animations and backgrounds, the voice acting in the limited animations was poorly done, and the characters were set in raw, poorly made character animations. The backgrounds used the voice-overs and character animations, but they were taped together and poorly made.
The voice acting in the Zelda CDI games is on another level. King Harkinian’s highs and lows in voice acting and absurdity showcase Shakespearean style in a child’s cartoon. “I’m so hungry, I could eat an octorok!” and the iconic, “My boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for!” Add in Link’s painful grunts and Zelda’s voice acting, and that’s a complete voice acting package.
The scenes were all more than bad. They were all wrong. They misunderstood the characters’ tone the most. This moment represents the most enduring part of the ZeldaCDI legacy meme. In the years before YouTube Poops, these clips received positive praise for their meek, absurd, and awkward qualities.
Development Hell: The Rough Making of a Zelda CDI Game
Looking into the making of the titles in this case is more of a perfect storm. The developer, Animation Magic, had more experience in animation than game design. The Philips CD-i had CDs with weak CPUs. They aren’t designed for fast-paced action. The mandate to use lots of FMV, a selling point of the hardware, directly went against making the Gameplay responsive.
Interviews and retrospectives from former team members describe the project as rushed and under-resourced. Working under the constraints of a AAA experience with B-tier tooling and a C-tier budget, while working with perhaps the most cherished franchise in gaming without any creator input, was a lot. Almost any development cycle was a failure from the start in the case of a Zelda CDI game. This made the project’s outcome a mere formality, not a question of possibility.
From Flop to Folk Hero: The Rise of Internet Meme Culture
The commercial collapse of the CD-i and the Zelda CD-ii games was total. They met the criteria for a discount bin pick. For a long time, these games remained firmly in the footnotes of Nintendo’s embarrassing history.
Then, the internet matured. In the early 2000s, sites like Newgrounds and YTMND began hosting edited, looped clips of the games’ most bizarre moments. The exaggerated animations and dialogue were perfect for remix culture. “My boy!” and “I wonder what’s for dinner?” became shared jokes among a growing cohort of online gamers.
The Zelda CD is a prime example of the reappropriation of culture into a commercially celebrated comedy icon. A trend embracing “so bad it’s good” left the CDI effectively “unplayed,” while game chatter exploded. The CDI reappropriation of Zelda CDI is a cultural example of a game failure turning into a commercial success.
The Preservation and Nostalgia of Zelda CDI
The games’ collective notoriety raises the question of whether they are commercially viable. Functionally playable CDI units are collector items, and original CDs are collector rarities. Emulation systems are used for preservation but are controversial. Definite historical preservation of “so bad it’s good” games is used to create systems that imitate Gameplay.
Playing a game from the Zelda CD-i is now less of a Gameplay session and more of an interactive exhibit. A disbursed classic franchise game lost its creative compass.
Nintendo has never acknowledged these titles. Mythical status is only further promoted by the franchise’s self-imposed silence, as they remained unplayed and unacknowledged titles that became a franchise and future games based on a classic distributed game.
The Unlikely Legacy: What the Zelda CDI Taught the Industry
Zelda’s CDI saga, when analyzed critically, might even be analyzed as a blunder, but that’s an oversimplification. The saga served as a lesson to Nintendo, and one that they want to forget. The lesson is that brand management and control are critical. Nintendo’s management and control over each of its major IPs were loosened with CDI, and so were the resulting products.
Fewer CDI products meant that Nintendo became more protective of its IPs, ensuring that Mario Tennis or a Zelda spinoff would be less frequent. Zelda CDI, then, served as a protective casing around Nintendo’s most prized IPs.
Instead, the internet’s spark turned that blunder into a commandable piece of art. Similarly, with the rise of YouTube culture, Nintendo’s blunder became a protective casing for the Zelda and CDI blunders, allowing brilliant and wild pieces of creativity to be born around an AI that connected to the blunders. The AI’s curiosities balanced around the blunders, protected the AI’s value, and the blunders had a value of their own.
The AI’s curiosity focused on the blunders, which also contributed to the roar of YouTube culture. Nintendo’s blunder served as a protective casing that enabled numerous values to be established. These pieces of value had their own value, separated from the blunders to which they were connected, while also balancing around the blunders. These pieces of value provided for the roaring YouTube culture. The blunders had their own value as well, and these pieces of value protected the blunders.
The zelda cdi games are not only poorly made games, but are reflections of a time in the rapid technological development of the late 1980’s and 1990’s, a time when the unintended “comedy” of the games were developed, and now permanently awkward part of gaming’s history in the tapestry of gaming’s history. The games solidify the point that sometimes, failure is much more impactful than being simply mediocre.
You may also read itbigbash
