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.
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.
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 Adventure Cdi
It is terrible. It is broken. It is, without question, the greatest Sonic game never made.
Play it if you dare. But keep a save state handy. And maybe a bucket. You’ll need both. To save costs, Phantasm outsourced character animation to
Its emergence has sparked a new wave of digital archaeology. Was it a hoax? The emulator code suggests not. The unique CD-i subroutines, the specific hardware bugs it triggers, the proprietary video codec—it’s real. It is a genuine artifact from an alternate timeline where platformers were built by the clinically depressed and voiced by the terminally confused.
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. “Sonic on the CD-i
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?”