Trivia / The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games

• Bury Your Art: Thanks to their strongly negative public reception, the games have never been reissued since their original release, with Nintendo outright disowning them.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • Link from the CD-i games is sometime associated with the phrase "Excuuuse me, Princess!", despite him never saying that. "Excuuuse me, Princess!" is Link's catchphrase from the Zelda cartoon.
  • The phrase "MAH BOI!" is commonly associated with the screenshot of King Harkinian holding up a finger. While this is part of the same line of dialogue, he actually makes the pose at the end, during the "for" in "this peace is what all true warriors strive for." When he says "Mah boi," it's an upper-body shot in which he holds a chalice of wine. It is also often misquoted as "LINK MAH BOI". The King also very clearly enunciated “My.”
  • Ganon says "You must die!" in Wand of Gamelon and "...or else you will die," in Faces of Evil. It's common for people to conflate the two lines or assume they're from the same scene, due to being so similar. Similarly, Ganon says "You haven't seen the last of me!" in Wand of Gamelon and "No, not into the pit! It burns!" in Faces of Evil; due to both scenes involving Ganon being trapped in a book, they're very often conflated into one scene.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: Despite the games' obscurity at the time of their release and their low budget, the French dub has popular voice actors:
  • Link is voiced by Thierry Wermuth, who is known for being the French voice of several South Park main characters, Tintin, and a regular in mainstream 3D animation.
  • King Harkinian and Morshu are voiced by Benoît Allemane, who is known for voicing most of Morgan Freeman's characters.
• Contractual Obligation Project: These games, along with Hotel Mario, exist as part of a contract Nintendo and Philips made after the cancellation of the SNES CD-ROM. Consequently, Nintendo had little interest or oversight other than ensuring that the characters were on-model in the packaging and manual artwork.
• Corpsing:
  • Even Link's voice-actor couldn't take the line about the "Smart Sword" seriously. He snickers when he gets to "In fact, it makes them talk!"
  • You can also hear King Harkinian's voice actor try to hold in his laughter when he says, "I wonder what's for dinner?"
• Creator Killer: The publicity fallout from the quality of the CD-i games did the exact opposite of what Philips wanted. Instead of reviving interest, the games turned the console into a laughing stock and led to its demise in the market, which cost Philips close to a billion dollars. Unsurprisingly, it directly led to Philips' decision to withdraw itself from the home console market upon the CD-i's discontinuation, and they have not attempted another go at it ever since.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Some obviously male characters such as a bearded blacksmith and an old fisherman are voiced by women.
• Disowned Adaptation:
  • Nintendo quickly regretted trying to strike any kind of deal with Philips, pulling the plug as soon as humanly possible; Nintendo employees had no hand in the development of the games. To that end Nintendo has made it very, very clear that the CD-i games have absolutely no place in the official Zelda history whatsoever, aside from the occasional mocking in their old magazine, Nintendo Power. It's gotten to the point where the magazine's preview for Spirit Tracks claimed that that game was the first time you could play as Zelda. In fact, she's the player character in two of these.
  • This is understandable, from both Shigeru Miyamoto and also from a Japanese POV; it was not a good idea allowing a Western studio to mess with one of Nintendo's core franchises without Nintendo's supervision, especially in that time, taking into account all the mess regarding the SNES CD add-on plus the 1993 Super Mario Bros. film, which led to a no-movie mandate from Nintendo until the late 2010s. That said, Cadence of Hyrule has since shown that Nintendo has become open to outsourcing the series to western studios - albeit one held in high regard and presumably with some actual supervision.
  • Hyrule Historia and The Legend of Zelda: Encyclopedia detail every game and spinoff up until their respective releases ^note Aside from Breath of the Wild, which received its own book., as well as every cameo and guest appearance the characters have made in other works, and even game advertisements and minor references to the series in other games... except for these three games.
• Executive Meddling: This article suggests that Philips required CD-i games to contain full motion video in order to show off the capabilities of the system.
• Fan Remake:
  • On November 27th, 2020, Twitter user Dopply released free remakes of Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon that, whilst not a 1:1 remake, was intended to keep true to the spirit of the games, and adds unlockables such as Hero Mode and the ability to play as Link, Zelda, and the King himself in both games.
  • In April 2023, developer and graphic designer John Lay released a Game Boy demake of Zelda's Adventure in the style of Link's Awakening and Oracle of Seasons/Ages.
• Genre-Killer: Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon — plus Zelda II's reputation as the Oddball in the Series — basically killed any chance of there being any further side-scrolling Legend of Zelda games. Since then, the nearest thing we've gotten to any further side-scrolling entries have been Zelda characters appearing or cameoing in other franchises, such as the Super Smash Bros. series and the Master Sword power-up in Super Mario Maker 2.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Like Hotel Mario, no re-releases have been made of these games, not even on the Virtual Console; understandable, since Nintendo and the Zelda fanbase regard the series as an embarrassment and want nothing to do with it. The CD-i is also notoriously difficult to emulate, so curious players are all but forced to shell out lots of money on the secondhand market to play the games for themselves, which doesn't help their reputation at all.
  • Dopply, the developer behind the fan remakes, pulled his downloads from the Internet shortly after they gained traction, as he intended for them to just be learning exercises rather than major projects. And so, removing them was a good-faith gesture considering how Nintendo usually handles fan games.
• Meme Acknowledgement: Astoundingly, Nintendo has referenced one of the many memes from this game on their official Twitter account (quite surprising considering they consider this an embarrassment through and through) on at least one occasion, where in a series of polls celebrating the 35th anniversary of the series, one question asked "Can you wait to bomb some Dodongos?"
• No Budget: According to some of the developers who had a hand in making the games, the games had an extremely tight budget of $600,000 per game, which led to several things:
  • All animations were outsourced to a group of Russian animators because hiring animators from the United States would be too expensive, as American animators were generally paid more compared to other animators during the early 1990s.
  • Moreover, because this was the early Nineties, the Internet just barely existed at all, so it just wasn't practical to simply outsource the work, as it would've been nigh impossible to coordinate with them. So the developers had to literally take half a dozen people from Saint Pete, stick them into a Boston apartment-turned-office and make them churn out animation for half a year. Naturally, the developers had to hire on the cheap, so these weren't the best animators in the first place, and to add insult to injury, they were specialized in a traditional pen-and-paper style and never touched a Video Game in their life.
  • Voice actors were hired by people who were in union groups, or actors on the cheap.
  • The development team were only given one year to finish making the games.
• No Export for You: Despite what people thought for many years, Zelda's Adventure actually didn't get an American release; It only reached store shelves in Europe. It may have been thought otherwise due to CD-i units being region free and the game having such a late release in the console's life.
• Recursive Adaptation: Link's obsession with getting a kiss from Zelda, Zelda being a very capable sword fighter and the portrayal of the King of Hyrule as a maniacal fat man and having the name "Harkinian", suggest that the developers might have had the The Legend of Zelda (1989) cartoon in mind rather than the games. One cutscene even shows Zelda in her outfit from the cartoon.
• Uncredited Role: Zelda's Adventure has no actors credited. Composer Mark Andrade stated that he was Gaspra, but his voiceover was Hal Smith in his final voice acting role.
• Underage Casting: In Zelda's Adventure, the old Gaspra was played by then-23-year-old music composer Mark Andrade who wore prosthetics.
• Unspecified Role Credit: Both Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon have voice actors credited, but it's never stated who voiced whom. Only Link and Zelda are credited in their respective games.
• What Could Have Been: According to a dev on Zelda's Adventure, the producers were in talks with Echo & the Bunnymen to do music for the game.

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