Man Behind Zelda CD-i Games Discusses Contract Details, Nintendo’s Input

Dale DeSharone was one of the lead developers at Philips and helped craft the contract between Nintendo and Philips. This contract is what lead to the trilogy of CD-i Zelda games, games most of you haven’t played but are generally considered to be really terrible – even if they did provide endless amounts of meme material. In fact, it’s almost as if those games practically founded the concept of YouTube poop. What’s really interesting however is that Philips did reach out for feedback and input out of Nintendo, and Nintendo did, in fact, give some. However, the focus seemed to be on the wrong aspect of what actually makes a good game.

“Somehow, Philips got a deal with Nintendo to license characters — as I understood the arrangement it wasn’t a license of five games, but five characters. A number of developers pitched American Interactive Media with ideas. I think American Interactive Media chose to go with the biggest names that Nintendo had at the time. We pitched separate ideas for a game starring Link and a separate one with Zelda. The development budgets were not high; as I recall they were perhaps around $600,000 each. We made a pitch that we could maximize the quality of the games by combining the funding to develop only one game engine that would be used by both games.

Nintendo’s only input was we ran the design document and character sketches past them for their approval. They were mostly interested in the look of the Link and Zelda characters. I think the characters were in somewhat of a formation stage back then, because really [they] didn’t appear as characters in the Nintendo game — they were on the box covers. We only had the two Nintendo games that had come previously [for reference] and then art from Nintendo in terms of the design — box and booklet artwork. Otherwise there wasn’t anything that came from Nintendo.”

Interesting, to say the least. It should be noted that DeSharone sadly passed away in 2008. These quotes were only recently uncovered in a recent feature over at Nintendo Life, a feature that is well worth the read for those interested in how these games and even Hotel Mario became a real thing.

Source: Nintendo Life