Codemasters' CD-i projects

Six months back Interactive Dreams published the first interview with the man behind Micro Machines: Ashely Hogg. Now, it's time for more! Ten years on and few British developers from the days of CD-i are still knocking around. With a few exceptions, most notably Codemasters. Affectionately known as the Codies they've seen through the rise and fall of many video game formats so it's hardly surprising they dabbled in Philips CD-i as well. Any questions you might think of are discussed including any other project Codemasters was considering to convert on the Philips CD-i. Read below some snapshots of this extensive interview or just click right ahead to The Black Moon Project to read the complete interview with Ashely Hogg.

After the multimedia angle hadn't exactly put a CD-i in every home, Philips started trying to get deals together to get larger name game titles ported to the system. Micro Machines and Codemasters were pretty big at the time so it wasn't a bad idea. [It] would be fairly simple from a code perspective, since CD-i had a 68000 series CPU and the Megadrive game had already been coded in 68000 assembler. Unfortunately, due to some rights problem [Codemasters] couldn't use that code. So the original NES 6502 assembler code [was used]. It wasn't the prettiest way to do it really, but time was likely to be short and at least it was methodical if not optimal. Philips had given us a useful base framework to get started with, as well as a development kit with [usefull tools]. During [Micro machines Codemasters was] talking about a couple of further projects. A conversion of Codies' Megadrive game Psycho Pinball was the most considered, and for a while there was talk of a deal to do a conversion of Theme Park. In the end though the budgets were never going to be big. Psycho Pinball developed by Codemasters and published by Philips for PC CD-ROM seemed the perfect conversion candiate to CD-i. However with the decline of CD-i during this games release around 1995 it's easy to understand why they never forged ahead with the project.

Ashley Hogg was interviewed by Devin

With many thanks to Ash for answering our questions, long live the Codies!