Nova Logic developed "Super Mario's Wacky Worlds on CD-i. Before they started to work on this, Nova Logic developed Jigsaw, an electronic puzzle game on CD-i. As these titles were many developed on Sony CD-i systems, they experienced troubles when releasing it on CD-i.
Nova Logic about their conversion of Jigsaw on CD-i: "Our CDi title, "Jigsaw", had been completely designed and specified by Sony. It was not an exciting game: it was designed to be soothing, even boring. New Age music played while the player switched identically-shaped pieces of an esthetically beautiful picture until all were in place. The market seemed to be older families who sat around the television even when there was nothing to watch. John Brooks had originally been the lead programmer on the project: I was brought in to assist when Brooks became stretched too thin.
Other projects were going on, of course. The greatest excitement at Novalogic was about a tie-in game to a Disney movie at the time, "The Rocketeer". For most of my time at Novalogic, the Rocketeer's costume and rocket backpack sat in a corner of my office.
As "Jigsaw" wore on, the main problems we faced were not the game. The obstacles thrown in our way were primarily Sony's ridiculous requirements for disc quality. For instance, that mouse click. It couldn't be a syntheric beep; it had to be recorded in a recording studio, to 16-bit quality! We fudged that by taking our 8-bit beep, resampling it to a higher rate, flanging and echoing it, then resampling it back with quadratic interpolation to the 44,100-Hz CD rate. The interpolation introduced low-level noise, which filled in the lower 8 bits and satisfied the censors. Another example: the entire game, sound, video and data, had to be placed on the disk TWICE. I still have a test disk sent from Sony, on which a quarter-inch square of nail polish had been placed to completely obliterate several CD tracks. The game was required to play perfectly even with this flaw: as the software would detect the flaw and switch to an alternate track!
As time wore on, "Jigsaw" came closer to completion. The only work on the program was complying with the Sony quality assurance department's fussy little nits -- a single scan line in a single picture being too rough in texture, for instance. All had to be "corrected" somehow, even if it meant doubling the size of some display programs. While this went on, however, we had time to experiment with the CD-i. For instance, Novalogic had one in-house-designed game, a submarine simulation called "Wolfpack", and I began a quick-and-dirty CD-i conversion with an eye to adding "bells and whistles" such as part-screen movie clips.
Two weeks before the opening deadline, two things were apparent. One was that "Jigsaw" would ship with the new produce, despite Sony's QA department continuing to discover new "bugs". The other was that the consumer electronics market was collapsing, the victim of a nationwide recsesion. Then came the blow. Up until now, Sony players were the only model on which we could test our products.
Then, finally, Panasonic came out with its companion model -- and "Jigsaw" wouldn't run on it."
[Thanks, Silas]
[Thanks, Silas]