Remember when we all pointed and laughed at a couple of Legend of Zelda games that were produced for the Philips CD-i as part of a contractual obligation?  Sure you do.  You can't forget images like this one no matter how hard you try.  Well, as it turns out, there's actually a game embedded in the middle of that horrible animation.  Yeah, who knew?  Hardcore Gaming 101 had the opportunity to speak with CD-i developer Dale DeSharone and learned just where things went wrong on the path to glory.

Given the amount of time we had, and what we were creating at the time in terms of company infrastructure, I thought we did a good job. You know, we weren't Nintendo. And Nintendo makes fantastic games, which are exceptionally well tuned in terms of gameplay. And they have amazing game designers. So, I would imagine that anything was going to fall short of that, in terms of the amount of time and energy that Nintendo puts into gameplay. Given the amount of time we had, and the fact that we were developing two at once, on a platform that was pretty limited, although the Nintendo machine at that time was also pretty limited and they did a great job with it... At the same time Philips was expecting, and I think we were all expecting, more graphics, more production values in terms of music, visuals, animation... So there was a lot of push there. You put effort into that, and it doesn't go elsewhere. I felt that, given the circumstances, we did a good job. It could have been better, of course it wasn't Nintendo.

It's quite a tale.  I find it interesting that development of these lackluster games spanned the globe.  After all, we're talking about characters licensed from a Japanese company by a Dutch company who in turn contracted an American game development firm that then outsourced the animation to artists from Russia.  All that effort for so little payout.