In the end it was a matter of luck that a batch of protoype CD-i disc surfaced in the hand of RW Bivins and he stirred the CD-i Community by releasing four CD-i games: Jack Sprite vs The Crimson Ghost, Go (English version), Space Ranger (Alpha version) and Plunderball. In an old interview with Devin on The Black Moon Project he talked about the rights, which were more a pat on the back like 'nobody does care about these anymore', which might be right. On the hand his company Oldergames gave us four beautiful CD-i releases which we all thankful for, all of them are rare and we haven't seen all original demo discs of them yet, except for the Go prototype.
Many years later, there are similar efforts like the reproductions of Voyeur 2 and Joe Guard. Voyeur 2, as well as the Oldergames CD-i titles, were all based on the white demonstration / testing phase discs. They were dumped and copied and most of them were 90% playable and just there for testing purposes to take out rare bugs.
How different are times now. Thanks to places like 'Hidden Palace', several batches of CD-i prototypes are uploaded for free, which is how the CD-i Community can play even more beta CD-i titles like Mind Quest and What's it Worth, both CD-i titles that never saw the light of day. Imagine these titles surfaced earlier: One of these 'companies' like Oldergames would gladly pick them up and treat them with love to reproduce a CD-i release, just like it would have happened for real if CD-i was given a few years more time to mature! (It can still happen, of course!)
[Thanks, Seventy7, K1ngArthur, Jeremy]
