Why was Super Mario's Wacky Worlds on CD-i never finished, while everyone agrees this title had huge potential on CD-i? CD-i member Catpix made an interesting observation, something that was not clearly stated in the various interviews we had with the developers before. Catpix: "There are contradictory claims about that question but games weren't the main focus of the CD-i. Even though you can find people claiming [Philips focused on games, ed], there's also testimonies of programmers showing games to Philips executives that were flabbergasted by the results [The story of SPC Vision, ed]; obviously even if they thought about games being a selling point of the CD-i, they never understood what could be done with it.
That also might be a factor of the CD-i "[not being prepared, ed]" for being a proper console: Again, Philips executives's lack of knowledge* about video gaming might have led them to believe they could do better than what they could realistically expect.
*it's made obvious by how they handled the Mario and Zelda franchises : why was Super Mario's Wacky Worlds never completed? Well because, from insider's words, the company never intented to make that game! Philips had offered a developement kit and money to anyone able to show them a working prototype.
But Philips forgot about adding that it should result in a working game at the end, so Super Mario's Wacky Worlds was programmed in 2 weeks and when the company got the money, that was the end of it. They ran with the development kit and money and Philips couldn't do anything about it."
OK. We have spoken to various ex-developers of Super Mario's Wacky Worlds to believe this is not the whole story, but in between the lines I still believe this general thought was actually happening. In the case of Mario Takes America a developer told us how easy Philips was in granting money to relatively unknown developers (CIGAM was just a start-up) to show Philips what could be done on the CD-i platform. This ended up in various developers showing a prototype but lacking the resources to actually complete a full CD-i game.
[Thanks, Catpix]