The Research department of Philips was responsible for creating a couple of the best CD-i games, including conversions of Lemmings, Striker Pro, Pac-Panic as well as their own first person shooter 'Atlantis: The Last Resort' and the very first online FPS: Ram Raid. These two shooters were technically a marvel on CD-i. It appears Philips Research was, next to these projects, also busy on a networked 3D car chasing game on CD-i. It was going to combine the techniques Philips learnt while developing Atlantis, Ram Raid and the knowledge it built while working on the seamless MPEG branching' technique. This technique is in the world of CD-i a remarkable piece of software and it offered the possibilty to connect MPEG video sequences seamlessly to each other, giving the impression the video is in a non-stop loop. In gaming this technique was explored in a racing game called 'Dead End' on CD-i by the third party developer Cryo (who also developed Lost Eden on CD-i). Dead End never happened due to technical difficulties. Philips Research was going to implement this further in their own racing game. Only if time allowed, as the project was cancelled as Philips was stopping the CD-i format in 1996-1997.
The Kathy Smith's personal trainer CD was made possible by one of the techniques Philips invented: "MPEG seamless branching", which allows for a continuous video/audio MPEG stream to be displayed, even though it is made of a multiple of very short clips (about 7 second). There are only a few CD-i titles that use this technique; The best example is The Lost Ride, where Digital Video is presenting a virtual roller coaster. Interesting is that the development of this 'Seamless Branching' continued at Philips Research into development of a networked 3D car chasing game for CD-i. From the developer:
"Two teams would compete against each other: the good cops and the bad villains. Each player would be part of one of the teams and through his car could see the whole city in 3D-generated MPEG video. MPEG seamless branching was going to be used to seamlessly arrange on the fly thousands of pre-produced road driving sequences (also played back at variable MPEG frame rates), in order to create the illusion of an interactive 3D of very high visual quality. Other cars were going to be shown as graphical sprites.
The project did not get past the prototype stage because of its costs, but if it had been completed it would have been the most complex and ambitious CD-i game ever produced. Technically it was a combination of techniques applied in Kathy Smith Personal Trainer (seamless branching), Dead End (variable mpeg frame rates) and networked gaming of Ram Raid (this was before the days of the Internet boom!). Too bad it did not happen. It was a lot of fun designing it though!"
[Scans by: KailoKyra. The quotes are from an anonymous source (known internally at Interactive Dreams)]