A former colleague talks about it: "This game was mocked up in a Hypercard stack for a presentation to American Interactive Media (later called Philips Interactive Media of America), which was funding most development for the CD-I player. My friend Michael Becker did most of the Hypertalk programming and the artwork, and I wrote the backstory. One of our challenges was to design a game that would present photorealistic images within the technical limitations of the CD-I player, whose CD drive only operated at normal (1X) speed. In the end we decided to do it by superimposing character sprites on photographed backdrops. We spent a lot of time looking at how sword fights were filmed in movies to get the best perspective.
AIM never obtained the D&D license from TSR, so the project never went any further."
Omegalfa interviewed former PF Magic programmer Ernest Adams and asked him about the Dungeons & Dragons project on CD-i.
PF Magic started the idea to port Dungeons & Dragons on CD-i in 1991. Like with several other CD-i projects, it didn't go any further than the first phase: a concept.
Ernest tells us that it was a first idea and PF Magic didn't have the Dungeons & Dragons license. Philips Interactive Media of America would have to get a license before actual code could be written, although the game idea could be converted into a different theme as well. But in this case, no actual code was written. It was going to be a single player adventure game set in a dungeon. Dungeons & Dragons CD-i was set up by high quality still images and it was not going to use the Digtial Video Cartridge. The task of Ernest Adams was to photograph the fights in the movies and to investigate how to do that, with respect to camera angles, scene selection etcetera.
As there was no code written for Dungeons &Dragons on CD-i, there is no demo available and also no screenshots or videos to show.The only art that was produced was a concept storyboard about the fights in Dungeons & Dragons CD-i, a general storyline. Unfortunately this is not available anymore. The project was abandoned because PF Magic had a deadline to finish 3rd Degree on CD-i and they were too busy with that. Moreover Philips Interactive Media of America was not eager to get a license for Dungeons & Dragons on CD-i. If it would have been continued, it was written in C linked in the Balboa library, that' s how PF Magic wrote their games. Ernest was not a assembly language programmer. As he sais: "Perhaps a pity because the 68000 is a nice architecture".