The Battle Chess project on CD-i was cancelled very near shipping, it delayed because it wouldn't play on one specific CD-i model

Battle Chess took a refreshing approach to the traditional board game, taking the wooden pawns, knights, kings and queens throwing them out the window and then replacing them with a much more interesting bunch of animated characters. It's still the same game but now instead of knight takes bishop it's a case of knight impales bishop, bishop dies a horrible death!! The first hint that this game was arriving on CD-i featured in a small column from Issue 7 of CDi Magazine (pictured below) indicating a deal had been struck between Interplay and Philips Media to release three games from their catalogue including Battle Chess, The Lost Vikings and a third unnamed title. Since this column was published over ten years ago nothing followed, no release dates, no previews, nothing, the projects literally disappeared without a trace.

That is until now, two decades after the first mention of a conversion to CD-i a working prototype of Battle Chess has been found from a specialist collector of the format. Originally purchased from Philips Eindhoven in the Netherlands as a job lot, this prototype was buried under a pile of already commercially released games. It comes on Kodak Writable media typical of the time with version 1.07 and a date of 4/10/96 scribed on the CD which tallies with the time period this game would have been developed.

As with previously discovered prototypes from this time like Plunderball, Battle Chess seems to be a fully formed game. Including the Philips CD-i bumper and Interplay logo before entering the title screen where you can even play a tutorial which literally talks you through the basic rules of chess with fully animated pieces. The game offers both 3D animated and a more traditional 2D view which incidently can be changed on the fly mid game if those lengthy animations ever become tiresome. This is a prototype game and as such has some bugs especially in respect to the Artificial Intelligence, it doesn't play a good game of chess. Besides this a few graphical glitches and hangups are all that sets this apart from a fully formed game. It's a base case title and as such doesn't require the extra memory from the Digital Video Cartridge.

Further investigation of the prototype revealed that Accent Media was responsible for the conversion of this title to CD-i and not a direct port by Interplay as the published article lead us to believe. We were fortunate enough to find some of the people responsible for the CD-i conversion with Jeff Lander, lead programmer on the project willing to submit to a short interview:

Devin: Hello Jeff could you tell us a bit about yourself and your work for Accent Media.

Jeff Lander:I am a computer game developer. I have my own company, Darwin 3D, that does game development, educational outreach, and small projects. Currently we produce the Game Tech conferences (www.game-tech.com) through Darwin 3D. I also work for Luxoflux on game console project with a team of about 80 people. Accent Media was a spinoff of a company I worked for that did computer graphics for television, film, and games. We had done numerous game show television projects and were approached to work on computer game versions of some of those shows. We did several for CDi including Jeopardy and the Joker’s Wild. From there we did pc and other console game projects until that company closed in 1997 or so. I have continued doing game and television/film projects on my own since then.

Devin: What was the development cycle for the cancelled game Battle Chess considering the first publicised article concerning the Interplay deal was from August 1994.

Jeff Lander:Battle Chess was set up to be a quick port to try and get some more mainstream game titles on to CDi. Interplay at the time was having problems and were not really behind the project. Getting assets and code was pretty difficult and the project was not really well suited to the CDi machine with its relatively low cpu power. I don’t remember the exact timeframe but we worked on in for quite a few months and got it just about ready to ship. There were some compliance issues and it needed further optimization when the word came down that PIMA (the Santa Monica portion of Philips) was closing down. The project was pretty quickly cancelled.
Devin: How big was the team working on the conversion of Battle Chess and did Interplay play a role in the titles development for CD-i other than providing the games assets.

Jeff Lander: If I recall correctly, most of the team was on other projects. I did the first pass at getting the game up and running. We had another programmer who worked on the code and a contractor from PIMA helped with low level optimization. There were several artists who worked on asset conversion. But it was a relatively small team. I don’t recall ever seeing the Interplay people. We would get a disc of data (I think it was the 3DO version or perhaps PC). Most of the art assets were converted using our in-house tools.