When battle-scarred gamers sit down over drinks to talk about the worst games ever made, some are spoken of in hushed tones as legends. Nobody has played them, but they’re out there, somewhere. I’m speaking, of course, of The Legend of Zelda games on the Phillips CD-i.

The story of how one of Nintendo’s crown jewel franchises came to be on a non-Nintendo machine is a little convoluted. Nintendo had an agreement with Phillips to manufacture a CD-based add on for the Super Nintendo, but reneged. As part of the breakup deal, Phillips got permission to use Nintendo characters.

The CD-i was an interactive CD-based set top device that Phillips had developed. It blazed a trail for the multimedia monstrosities that plagued the early 1990s. There were three Zelda games on the CD-i, all made by third parties and all pretty awful. The anemic CD-i was just never properly designed to be a game machine.

If it were just the technical limitations that plagued the Zelda knockoffs, they probably would have just faded away. However, two of the games went that extra mile to really nail their place in history as the worst games ever. Link: The Faces Of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon both had animated cutscenes.

Today in 2008, we no longer have to try to describe these indescribable cutscenes. Thanks to YouTube, we can see them for ourselves.

Milk that cow, your highness.

It’s a good thing someone wrote that, then.

Bear in mind this was two years after Link to the Past (aka concentrated awesome) was released for the SNES.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past trivia

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