American company Viridis became well-known after creating Zelda's Adventure on CD-i in 1995. Zelda's Adventure was special as (1) it was a Nintendo licensed game on the Philips CD-i platform and (2) it was only released in Europe (while Viridis itself was a Los Angeles based USA company) which makes this game rather rare (and expensive) nowadays. But developer Viridis was originally, besides the Zelda CD-i project, more focused on edutainment software, just like most other CD-i developers. We discussed before a different game that was in the pipeline on CD-i, Food Dude, but that game was actually derived from an earlier CD-i project that didn't got off the ground: 'Stay Healthy for Life: An Interactive Diet'. Food Dude was developed in 1993 even before Zelda's Adventure. According to Eric Milota, the 'Stay Healthy' CD-i was actually finished on CD-i. "It contained a thing called the ‘Foodulator,’ which was a sort of calorie counter for foods. There was this FDA database of like 5,000 foods that you could look up and build a menu, and it’d keep track of how many calories you were consuming per meal/per day."
Viridis also developed and released 'Draw 50 with Lee Ames' on CD-i, and Eric Milota remembers that a few other CD-i projects were on the shelf: "an unnamed title programmed by Gavin James called Jester, some sort of Direct TV tie-in title, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! the Interactive Board Game, and Food Dude." In the final days of Philips Media Games, headed by David McElhatten, he remembers discussions with Viridis about the possibilities to bring Annatommy to CD-i, but as CD-i was failing, the funding eventually didn't get off the ground. "Viridis got a lot of projects without really having much of a clue about game development.” The same counts for 'Stay Healthy', another edutainment title by Viridis. In an article on NintendoPlayer, some interesting bits popped up about the other projects by Viridis.
In 1995, Viridis had to fire most of its employees unfortunately. Philips Interactive Media was closing, CD-i was failing. The 'interactive' era was over and slowly taken over by the rising internet era. Viridis did not put all its money on CD-i development though and they were also developing on PC, but they were still depending too much on Philips for their publishing activities. When Philips Interactive Media of America ceased to exist, the leftover of Viridis was not able to flourish ever since.
Be sure to check out this article at NintendoPlayer and the David McElhatten interview on Interactive Dreams
[credits: David McElhatten, NintendoPlayer, Eric Milota, Jason Bakutis, Randy Casey, Scott Kravitz]