CD-i Magazines around the world
>> Saturday, January 31, 2009
Here you will find information about CD-i Magazines and Publications. In the UK CD-i was the first publication exclusively dedicated to Philips new machine and was published by the very same company in the United Kingdom. It reads more like a catalogue than a serious piece of journalistic material, hopelessly biased praising the system. Even to the extent of describing the introduction of the CD-i to America as a "success" when in fact it couldn't be further from the truth. It's not known how many of these were eventually published but by the description on the first magazine as "Volume 1 Issue 1" it's obvious they planned to push ahead with more of these!!
After this, CDi was the first real consumer-aimed CD-i magazine with some issues containing a cover disc, again in the UK. The disc on issue 2 was the famous Valkieser demo that was originally made for CD-I WORLD, containing some of the first MPEG clips ever published. Amongst other discs was the Micro Machines demo version. They consequently spelled CD-i as CDi. The last issue was thought to be number 19, published in August 1996. The last page said: "The Next issue of CDi magazine will be published on October 3. Frequentasne hunc locum?". The Latin text means "if it will ever happen", fortunately a 20th final issue did appear in the UK which included a preview of the last CD-i game released, "Solar Crusade".
In the USA there was also CDi Magazine. This was the sister publication of CDi magazine UK produced by the same team. Generally the articles and reviews are exactly the same as it's parent magazine although their are some notable variations. One prominent difference is the advertising, the US edition has a much more direct eye catching appeal compared to the UKs darker and more information based adverts (release dates, price etc etc..). Only 5 editions of the magazine were eventually made ending with the last May 1995 release.
In the USA there was another paper about CD-i, called CD-I WORLD. Mainly aimed at CD-i developers and publishers, it was a tabloid-sized "newspaper-like" magazine covering both professional and consumer CD-i news containing a lot of advertisements of CD-i developing studios and CD-i authoring tools (OptImage, MediaMogul). Published before the US consumer launch in october 1991, it was the first dedicated CD-i magazine. There were also many "special issues" that were given away at multimedia exhibitions and fairs. There were also some CD-I WORLD disc issues, containing commercials for CD-i studios and demos of authoring tools, and they published a CD-i Sourcebook on CD-i, some sort of yellow pages of CD-i developers.
The most popular CD-i Magazine was published in the Netherlands, the home country of CD-i (and Philips). It started in 1994 and lasted until 1998. You can download each dutch CD-i Magazine from www.philipscdi.com, right here.
Over to some more curious CD-i Magazine editions. I don't know a lot about these issues and I would love to read/see them. First: The USA edition of CD-I WORLD:Below the French CD-i Magazine:
Below you'll find the italian CD-i Magazine:
I also found four covers of the swedish CD-i Magazines, previously unknown to me! If anyone of you have one of these, please let us know! Click on each image to enlarge them. The bottom right one shows that Discworld is being mentioned! I'd love to know what they have to say about this mysterious CD-i game! Also Battle Chess and Voyeur 2 are mentioned!