The Legend of Zelda · Philips CD-i · 1993 · Preceded by: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
A broken partnership between Nintendo and Philips left Philips holding the rights to Link and Zelda. It used them for two games made on about $600,000 in a little over a year, and they became the most mocked games in the series' history.
The two CD-i Zelda games exist because of a deal that fell apart. Nintendo had first partnered with Sony, in 1989, on a CD-ROM add-on for the Super NES, then switched to Philips, and then abandoned the add-on altogether. As part of the settlement, Philips was licensed to use Nintendo characters, including Link, Zelda and Ganon, in games for its own CD-i player. Philips gave the Zelda projects to Animation Magic, with a budget of approximately $600,000 and a deadline of a little over a year to make two games. To make that possible the studio built both on the same engine and developed them simultaneously. Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon were released on 10 October 1993 in North America. The animated cutscenes were made by Russian animators led by Igor Razboff, reportedly working for six months while living in Boston apartments — said to be the first time an American games company had used Russian outsourcing. At the time, reviews were mixed, and some praised the animation and the high-resolution graphics. Later assessments turned universally negative, criticising the plots, voice acting, controls and graphics. Coming after A Link to the Past, the games were a jarring step down for the series — side-scrolling, awkward to control and far removed from Nintendo's own design standards. Their cutscenes later found a second life as internet memes, with characters such as the merchant Morshu becoming staples of YouTube Poop videos.
The CD-i Zeldas were never a Nintendo project that went wrong. They were a contractual by-product: characters handed to another company to close out a deal, then produced as cheaply and quickly as that company could manage. Animation Magic's decision to share one engine across both games was a sensible response to an impossible budget, and it guaranteed that neither game would have the design attention a Zelda normally receives.
The disappointment was sharpest for players who had just finished A Link to the Past, one of the most carefully designed games of its generation. To go from that to these was to see what the series looked like without the people who made it.