The Digital Video Cartridge slot in a CD-i player is actually designed as general purpose system bus interface. This means that in principle, Philips would have been able to develop different kind of cartridge updates, with more memory and with more gaming specific capacities. When Philips was exploring its possibilities to continue on CD-i (2), a specific gaming cartridge was one of the possibilites. In this way, a relatively low-cost solution would boost the gaming performance of CD-i and it would match the comopetition a little better. It would give the CD-i sprite facilities and graphics coprocessing. It was a real possibility. The reason behind this was the history of gaming on CD-i. CD-i was originally not a pure game machine and the first games that came out on the platform were games like "Text Tiles", "Backgammon" and 3rd party games like "Dark Castle". The company SPC Vision opened the eyes of Philips on what CD-i could actually do.
The Apprentice was made in 1994 yet no further releases that could have tweaked the original and been quite something were ever released. (Of course a sequel was planned but never finished). Philips should have realised the small collection of quality titles and used them as a benchmark and as a platform to greater things.
CD-i games like Atlantis and Litil Divil make clever use of the extra memory of the Digital Video Cartridge. Is was not only 'extra' memory, it was also 'faster' memory. Even without a need to do full motion video, the DVC was already a game-enhancing cartridge that gave a boost to the game performance. So the idea to build upon this fact by creating a new "Game Cartridge" was not a bad idea.
CD-i games like Atlantis and Litil Divil make clever use of the extra memory of the Digital Video Cartridge. Is was not only 'extra' memory, it was also 'faster' memory. Even without a need to do full motion video, the DVC was already a game-enhancing cartridge that gave a boost to the game performance. So the idea to build upon this fact by creating a new "Game Cartridge" was not a bad idea.
Not many people like Pinball or Tetris on CD-i but again these are very playable games that were released around 1992, but Philips never tried to create any follow-up.
it’s really sad that the Apprentice 2 never got finished. The graphic quality of the Apprentice should have been utilised and by 1996 could have had a catalogue of quality platform games and just imagine if the same team had been given the Mario named projects! It's amazing what The Vision Factory was capable of making!
The funny thing is, that team pushed the boundaries of what the device is capable of. Even Philips thought that the CD-i was incapable of such mechanics. And compared to other consoles of that generation (4th gen) it was a thing of beauty.
The sad truth still remains that 'the internet' only knows of the Mario and Zelda games through YouTubePoop videos. Other games get some light, but they never outshine the darkness of Zelda.
Too bad though, as I think they're pretty decent 'dungeon crawler platformers' in a Legend Of Zelda setting.
If only Philips marketed the dang thing as a game console much much earlier. If The Apprentice 2 would have been finished, it would have been a different team, because the creators (both programmer and graphics designer) of the original Apprentice had long left the company. This was probably the reason that Philips got cold feet, although there could also have been market realities...
It was amazing for CD-i. Most of the relevant CD-i people at The Vision Factory came from the Atari and Amiga demo scenes, where the techniques used were commonplace. However, they were applied "to the limit", on multiple instances these people were not satisfied until the "sustained 90% cpu usage" limit was reached
Compared to "actual" game machines the CD-i platform was underpowered quite a bit (and probably also priced quite a bit higher). At one point there was talk of adding a "game cartridge" with some sprite facilities and graphics coprocessing, not unlike the Digital Video Cartridge (it would have gone in the same slot which is actually a general purpose system bus interface), but this never happened.
[Thanks, Chris, CD-i fan, Eric and Paul]