Creature Shock on CD-i was first announced in 1994 including a preview and screenshots, but it was not until 1997when the CD-i conversion was finally available. It seems the CD-i version was finished in 1995/1995 but some nasty crashes remained in it that proved really difficult to hunt down. Paul Clarke, who developed the NIRD (Non-Intrusive Real-time Debugger) at Philips Research and who wrote CD-i games RAM Raid and Atlantis: The last Resort, came to help:"I made a visit to them to help - just for a day though, a couple of bug fixes only. Great team! I guess it would be sometime in late '95 or '96 as I left in '99 and did a load of other work with them on non-CDi- stuff. As I recall the game was pretty much done but had some nasty crashes which were proving really tough to hunt down. I went to their office in London as I recall with the NIRD, and I worked with their programmer. The NIRD alarm went off as soon as the game started even though it carried on playing - a null-pointer exception that seemed okay but actually was indicative of a few problems we found (big NIRD value was spotting these as well as showing up to 16384 bus cycles up to a crash, disassembled, and tied to source code or symbol table if they were available). As I recall we solved a few issues and all was better."
Paul Clarke has a very important influence in the development of various CD-i games and thanks to him some high profile CD-i titles could actually see the light of day. Paul: "I was working as a Grad at Philips Research Labs in Redhill. The team there were working on authoring tools for CD-i. After a month or two of familiarisation with the system I started work on the hardware and software for the Non-Intrusive Real-time Debugger and from that helped manufacture about 25 of them plus use them myself with studios to help debug key titles eg 7th Guest, Burn:Cycle, and others. In lunchtimes I put together and optimised a 3D game engine using graphics ripped from Doom. Philips Media then asked me to write a game working with the Philips ADS team - which became Atlantis. Part way through we interrupted that to help CD-Online launch by releasing an online version called RamRaid. Best technical working days of my life - not so technical now!"
[Thanks, Paul Clarke]