The Philips CD-i is a strange side-story in the history of video games. It was born from a fruitless relationship with Nintendo to add a CD drive to the Super Nintendo and had many innovations, including some limited internet connectivity and the option to watch movies on a disc well before the DVD player was a thing. It also considered a failure.

This week on Replay, Andrew Reiner, Jeff Cork, Javy Gwaltney, and me take a look back at the bizarre system, running through a handful of games that include guest stars like Hulk Hogan, a post-apocalyptic human versus anthropomorphic mutant animal beat 'em up, a Rear Window simulator, and more than one abstract science-fiction adventure. It's a strange trip down a rabbit hole of a console that few have memories for and there are some gems, to be sure.

Arguably the Philips CD-i's biggest claim to fame, is that it hosted four games with Nintendo's characters thanks to loopholes present in the relationship mentioned above. We don't play those games in this episode, but we did a previous episode. For our Replay of Hotel Mario and two of the Zelda games that released on Philips CD-i, head here. For a similar round-up of games from another forgotten console, head here for our Replay covering the TurboGrafx-16.

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