I've never paid a lot of attention to the CD-i catalogue numbers, but when I recently found some misunderstandings about the CD-Online discs and the availability of the Ram Raid game on it, I learnt that the catalogue numbers are a nice way to find the differences. The catalogue numbers also tell you in which (european) country the title is released (and generally what language the title is in).
Let's have a look at Zelda's Adventure on CD-i. As far as the CD-i community was aware of, this game was only released in Europe in the english language with a multi-language packaging. The catalogue number is 8100147. The game was published by Philips Interactive Media in Europe. In the USA, home to Philips Interactive Media of America (PIMA), different catalogue numbers were used. (320xxxx-2, 310xxxx-2, depending on the region).
CD-i has quite a lot of 'Testing Phase' discs. Almost every CD-i title has surfaced testing phase copies. There are so many that I sometimes doubt the genuinity of all those discs :) . It appeared that even Zelda's Adventure has a surfaced 'Testing Phase' disc, which actually shows a USA catalogue number:
The past days I contacted some old contacts who know confirmed that Zelda's Adventure was planned to get a USA release, but somewhere before that, still in 1995, PIMA cancelled their publishing activities on CD-i in the USA. So around 1995, CD-i games were not seperately published (and printed) in the USA anymore. A USA release of Zelda's Adventure was planned but never released.
Another interesting aspect is that in Europe we have two versions. Widely spreaded is the 8100147. More rare is the 8100157. While the game itself is english only, the box art is multi language; although there are two versions. The 8100147 contains the languages English, German, French and Dutch. Version 8100157 contains the languages English, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
