You know Creative Media was a very small company. Games like the original Christmas Country were finished in just six months time, because otherwise it would not pay itself back. It's times like this I'll never forget. Putting out games to the market with an estimated price of only 20 dollars, offering you a lot of fun and great gameplay, especially on a system (=cd-i) which is known for slowdowns and slow-paced complex games. Christmas Country was, in any sense, to compete with Super Mario platformers, like there were none of those on CD-i.
Platforming was rare on CD-i, and two of the best available were The Apprentice and Lucky Luke, both developed by Eindhoven-based SPC Vision (The Vision Factory). Now, calling their advertisement with "Finally a platform game with several kinds of enemies", I reckon they refer back to their own prequel to Christmas Country: Christmas Crisis. Two titles that are often mixed up with each other. If you've followed the story on Creative Media and DIMA from one year back at The Black Moon monthly, you've figured out the differences, but not only that!
Creative Media had a lot of plans in mind for future releases on CD-i. CD-i was seen as a dead format but with a lot of fans yearning for new games. Creating games in just a few months and selling them for dirt cheap sounded as the perfect solution. However, as you know by now Tetsuo gaiden already meant the end of Creative Media and even their last title "Whack a Bubble" was sold after Creative Media was already vanished. However, they had plans for an update of Christmas Country.
Of course people complained on a few simple mistakes they made with the first: no background music, and no vertical scrolling possibilities. At first, technical limits of the CD-i were the reason, but after a little more development time (after Christmas Country was already released (time=money!)) they found more ways to enhance the scrolling mechanisms and reserved some memory for background music. New levels were designed and put together as Christmas Country: The lost Levels. Unfortunately, Creative Media was a little too ambitious, and not willing to cross platforms with their strong vision of new arcade classics. The lost Levels will be remembered as how Christmas Country was supposed to be, even when the former was already an excellent platformer.
[Covers thanks to Patrick Selten, screens by Halfblindgamer]