"Unlicensed" is a term in the video game world broadly meaning releases unsanctioned by the system's parent company. GameShark and Action Replay come to mind.
However a handful of independent game publishes over the years have taken to self-releasing games. On many consoles, playing such games requires hacking the hardware - or other trickery. However since CD-i has no inherent built-in detection of unofficial games (other than a quirky filesystem), the unlicensed titles released for the CD-i play out-of-the-box. Very convenient! ... if only you could find them.
You see over the years, the handful of unlicensed CD-i titles have fallen into obscurity in terms of availability. Frog Feast for example was limited to run of 50 CD-i discs (ported and released more broadly for other consoles). Frog Feast was released by OlderGames, while all the other unlicensed CD-i titles were released by OlderGames & Good Deal Games - titles including: Go, Go: Special Edition, Space Ranger, Jack Sprite Vs The Crimson Ghost, and Plunderball.
Recently, The World Of CD-i member alphavilleCDi was kind enough to dump their original copy of Frog Feast for us all to enjoy.
Recently, Space Ranger and Jack Sprite Vs The Crimson Ghost are available as well!
Go: Special Edition has been available sometime in the Redump.org Romset. This is the title that brought Blazers and I together many months ago! Apparently sourced from an official USA preproduction disc, since it has matching hashes to it.
For all of your who like plundering balls, have at it!
One more oddity stands out in the quest for info regarding CD-i Unlicensed:
While this version of Go is listed as SOLD OUT on the Good Deal Games site, Bas of Interactive Dreams says it was never released. Since the hash of a preproduction CD-i version of Go matches the Go: Special Edition, it seems unlikely another unlicensed English build would exist.
Special thanks to The World of CD-i for doing their part in disc preservation! Cheers to Blazers for Plunderball!
