If one company brought amazing games to CD-i, let's discuss Virgin Interactive. Who would have thought that games like The 7th Guest and Creature Shock would run on the underpowered CD-i?
When Virgin teamed up with Philips, their first effort was to deliver the assets to Philips so the Freeland Studios (first Dorking studio) was able to port the CD-ROM version to CD-i. Eventually The 7th Guest was released on CD-i in 1993. Next to that Virgin assigned Cryo to develop a CD-i version of their popular Lost Eden game, which was released in 1995. Meanwhile in 1994, Virgin assigned Argonaut to create Creature Shock on the CD-i platform. The Creature Shock conversion was handled by one person and it took him three years to complete it (Creature Shock was released in 1997). Apparently Virgin and Philips allowed Argonaut to work on it so long!
Creature Shock on CD-i was particularly interesting as it was the first (and only) game that was shipped on two discs, so the game was loaded into the memory completely and be able to eject and to ask for the second disc. It worked flawless. We know that several software tricks were delivered by Philips Sidewalk and Philips ADS, we can imagine they helped Argonaut on the way to port Creature Shock in a smooth way to CD-i, although we remember the developer telling us he was facing many technical challenges as well and it was even close or Creature Shock on CD-i would not have happened at all...
Whe found a few colleagues who worked at Virgin at the time (1992) when they merged with Westwood Studios. Virgin asked Westwood to develop a CD-i version of The Lion King on CD-i in 1993. Since then, we have never heard anything of the project. Westwood was taken over by EA in 1998 (who were not a CD-i fan anymore). Somewhere along the way the priority of a CD-i version was lowered or technical issues were the problem, we don't know. It should have been the first Virgin game that could not rely on digital video techniques, as Westwood created a 2d platformer out of it. As scrolling techniques on CD-i were difficult, we can imagine it was not running fluently on CD-i.
[Thanks, Scott, Joseph]