CD-i left us with a lot of unreleased prototypes, that's for sure. Some of them were never found and it remained unclear if any playable demo actually exists. Sometimes its existence was promoted by Philips Media by including video footage on a demo disc or a preview in a CD-i magazine. In the case of Dead End, we know it would have been a high profile title like Microcosm or even Discworld. The footage that was shown to us on a few demo discs is about a racing game that includes shooting and driving over different lanes in different settings. It would have been a digital video title, but with the limitations of CD-i this was technically an on-rail shooter where you had to push the right buttons on the right moment. You could compare the gaming mechanism a little to how it was used in Space Ace and Dragon's Lair. The CD-i game Dead End was developed by Cryo Interactive; the same team who developed Lost Eden on CD-i (co-published by Virgin).
To create a higher interactivity feeling in an on-rail shooter, Cryo was developing some very nice techniques together with Philips, specifically for the CD-i system. On the first hand, Philips was developing a system that could seamless connect MPEG videos to each other to create one long reel of video, that would give a more immersive feeling when you are playing a racing game. You don't want the loading skip time every time between a corner. This 'Scalectric' system was pioneered by Philips but in the end only shown to us in The Lost Ride, a game that was published in 1998 by The Lost Boys. This is the most notable example of a game that has seamless MPEG videos connected to each other. The technique was developed by Philips and they helped developers with this to create better CD-i games.
Next to this 'seamless branching', Cryo and Philips were exploring the possibility to play MPEG videos at a variable frame rate. In this way, you could simulate a car actually accelerating or slowing down. This was made possible by a revolutionary technique called ‘Continuously variable MPEG video frame rates’ developed by Philips Media Los Angeles’ software engineers. What this technique basically did was to slow down and speed up the video stream the CD-i player would play, based on the player’s commands (accelerating and braking).
The MPEG stream was the pre-rendered streets the player would be racing on. The fact that the graphics would be pre-rendered (just like Chaos Control or Solar Crusade for example) would guarantee spectacular graphics for this racing game, probably even better than Ridge Racer, since the Playstation game would rely on real-time rendering of the graphics.
Cryo Interactive worked closely with Philips Media to incorporate this technique, but in the end decided it would be a lot easier to have the MPEG video play at a fixed rate instead, since they were having difficulties incorporating the ‘Continuously variable MPEG video frame rate’s. It would take away the racing part of the game, so they decided to name it a ‘driving game instead of a ‘racing game’.
Of course it’s not much fun to merely have to drive around streets dodging cars and objects, so that’s probably when Cryo thought of mounting a gun on the top of the car to make at a driving / shooting game. This final specification was then developed into the game which was first demo’ed at E3 in 1995 (in a playable form) and in this rolling demo (april 1995).
At present no reasons are known for the cancellation of Dead End. Speculations range from the came being too difficult to develop, too expensive to finish or a lack of worldwide CD-i sales which made the project commercially less attractive.
A spokeperson about Dead End: "Dead End is a game I got involved with from the very beginning, when Philips Media was still going strong, and again it was going to be based on another technique I invented: "Continuously variable MPEG video frame rates" (a subtle variation around seamless branching, at the frame level). It was not going to be implemented directly by Philips though, and I only served as a consultant to the company that owned the project.
Believe the project went through several restarts because of technical difficulties in the implementation (engineers were having problem grasping the technical concept of fooling the MPEG decoder into playing video at unusual frame rates), and the last version I saw had been scaled down quite a bit: it was playing the video at a fixed rate, which kind of defeats the purpose of a racing game. I remember seeing some really cool MPEG footage of Highway 1 from Malibu to Santa Monica, created by a production studio in Paris (France) for this game, and it looked great on CD-i. I believe there was also an arcade version of Dead End under production by that same company, with dedicated hardware for accelerating/decelerating the MPEG video playback rate, but I never saw it finished either."
The basics of Dead End were indeed an "on-rail shooter"', you had to press the right button on the right moment. To get Dead End a little more interactive, developer Cryo was exploring a technique to play MPEG video at variable frame rates, so this would simulate in Dead End accelerating and slowing down. I've never seen this technique in practice, so it's possible the game was just too difficult to develop. Moreover, Philips was developing this technique and stopped with it in 1996, Cryo went its own way (away from their partnerships with Virgin and Mindscape) so it could never be completed on CD-i...
[Thanks, Merijn]