After many trial and error we managed to find a source who claims to have worked on the CD-i version of Discworld. In a team together with Simon Turner, the animator of Teeny Weeny Games, and Greg Barnett (writer of the script) more details pop up on what the final state of Discworld CD-i was and why it was not released. Our investigation started with the producer at that time, Angela Sutherland, but she does not remember the CD-i specifics anymore. First we thought that was it and the CD-i version might only exist on paper, but that is clearly not the case. According to our source, test discs were produced of at least three versions, which gives us hope that one of these will eventually pop up somewhere.
It seems that sound issues and crashes eventually led to cancelling the CD-i project. Combining voice-overs and music was technically very challenging on the CD-i hardware. Together with the initial wrong decision to design Discworld CD-i as a base-case CD-i title might have been the reason they were not able to finish the CD-i port properly. Without the voice-overs, Teeny Weeny Games was not convinced to bring the true Discworld experience to CD-i. We were gently asked not to publish directly our email conversations but these parts were actually approved to show you. In the CD-i version, the action scenes were already scrapped, so it would only rely on four chapters of the story-driven traditional film, the basis of the original game. The puzzles were all converted to CD-i. The fact it was chosen to develop Discworld on CD-i as a base-case CD-i title was a decision by Philips. Teeny Weeny Games wanted to secure the quality of the original PC version (The CD-i version was a conversion from the PC version). In the test discs, all graphics and animation was included, except for the voice-overs. As Teeny Weeny Games put a lot of effort in creating the music and voices, they really did not want to compromise on this, or just leaving it out of the CD-i version.
We at Interactive Dreams are very excited about this, as Discworld on CD-i is one of the few big CD-i releases that we still want to find/uncover properly! With this source, we're getting closer to the fire. To be continued later.
[Source @ Interactive Dreams]