And then, lurking in the shadowy back alleys of ROM forums and lost Geocities archives, there is the ultimate white whale: .
Early footage—recovered from a corrupted DVCAM tape—shows Sonic rotating on the spot while a blurry checkerboard pattern scrolls behind him. A debug counter reads “SPEED: 0.0.” A post-it note visible on a monitor reads: “Velocity not possible. Increase friction?”
This is the story of the game that wasn't. The game that shouldn't be. The game that redefines the word "unplayable." To understand Sonic Adventure Cdi , you must first understand the Phillips CD-i. Launched in 1991, it was a multimedia “player” that also played games, boasting a staggering 1MB of RAM and a green-book CD format that could store full-motion video. In practice, it was a catastrophe. Its processor was sluggish. Its controller was an ergonomic war crime (a plastic slab with a click-wheel and a number pad). And its development tools were, by all accounts, a form of psychological torture.
Play it if you dare. But keep a save state handy. And maybe a bucket. You’ll need both. Sonic Adventure Cdi
In a baffling decision, the composer—a friend of Van Der Berg’s who owned a Korg M1—was told to make “jungle music, but sad.” The soundtrack of Sonic Adventure Cdi is a 32-minute loop of detuned breakbeats, a crying saxophone sample, and what sounds like someone dropping a toolbox in a swimming pool. The main theme, “Blue Is the Color of My Trauma,” has no lyrics—just a vocalist whispering “go fast… go fast… stop being slow…” over a diminishing 303 bassline. After months of restoration and error-correction by a collective of masochistic data hoarders, a playable build of Sonic Adventure Cdi was finally emulated in December 2024. It is, without hyperbole, the worst thing ever coded.
To save costs, Phantasm outsourced character animation to a small studio in Bratislava that had previously only made a stop-motion toothpaste commercial. The animators were given a single reference sheet: the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon, paused on a frame where Sonic is screaming.
It is terrible. It is broken. It is, without question, the greatest Sonic game never made. And then, lurking in the shadowy back alleys
And yet, here it is. Running at 12 frames per second. The saxophone sample looping. Barry the cab driver sighing, “Gotta… go… ugh, do I have to?”
To the casual fan, the name elicits a confused chuckle. “Sonic on the CD-i? That’s impossible.” And for the longest time, they were right. It was impossible. A nightmare. A fever dream that should have stayed buried in the unmarked grave of 1990s licensing hell. But in 2024, a single, corrupted beta ROM surfaced on a dusty FTP server in Finland. The internet hasn’t been the same since.
The result is… something else. Sonic’s model is a 3D-rendered abomination—eyes too wide, quills that clip through his own torso, a mouth that animates independently of his face. When he spins, he doesn’t curl into a ball. Instead, his limbs snap to his sides like a man falling down an elevator shaft, and he rotates around his own spine. The spin-dash takes 4.7 seconds to charge. Testers reported nausea. Increase friction
What nobody knew—what was buried in a contract addendum no one read—was that the license also included a single, non-exclusive option for Sega’s mascot. Sega, deep in the throes of the Saturn’s disastrous launch and terrified of Sony, sold the CD-i rights for a pittance. The check cleared. The deal was done.
In the mid-90s, desperate for software, Phillips struck a deal with Nintendo to license their characters. The result was the unholy trinity: Hotel Mario and the two Zelda games, The Faces of Evil and The Wand of Gamelon . These were animated abominations, defined by janky controls, hilarious voice acting, and cutscenes that looked like a high schooler’s first Flash animation.
Sonic was going to the devil. The developer assigned to the project was a small Dutch studio named Phantasm Software , known only for a forgotten golf game and an interactive encyclopedia of mollusks. Led by a manic, chain-smoking programmer named Henrik Van Der Berg, the team was given eight months, a budget of $150,000, and a single design document: “Make it like Mario 64, but on CD-i.”
In the sprawling, chaotic history of video games, certain titles achieve a strange kind of immortality. Not for greatness—but for the sheer, breathtaking improbability of their existence. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing . The Phillips CD-i Zelda games.