Link: The Faces of Evil

Cutscenes

This game and its two CD-I counterparts have lots of camp value, and because of this, they are a popular subject of YouTubePoop remixes etc.

Development

The reason Nintendo licensed their Zelda characters to Philips Interactive was because Philips and Nintendo were co-creating a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. The contract between them allowed Philips to create games with the Mario and Zelda characters. Although Nintendo never released a CD-ROM add-on for SNES, they did have the legal contract with Philips, so Philips was able to create three Zelda-based games and one Mario-based game.

In 1987 Dale DeSharone established a team who worked for Spinnaker Software. The studio had a deal with Philips to produce seven CDi launch titles. In 1991 Dale left and set up his own company called Animation Magic, who got funding from American Interactive Media (AIM), which was the contractor for Philips. Philips got a deal with Nintendo to license five characters.. AIM was not much into games and "characters", so they left everything in hands of Dale and his company giving him a budget of $600.000 per game (which was pretty much not much in comparison to the other titles CDi got). He figured that they could maximize the quality of the games by combining the funding to develop only one engine that would be used in two games: Zelda: Wand of Gamelon and Link: Faces of Evil. AIM wanted to have full-motion animation in the games and the budget was tight so Dale decided to contract Russian animators. He brought them to US for sixth months where they worked for the project. The developers struggled with CDi limitations in every department: streaming audio, memory, disc access, graphics capabilities not to mention an IR controller that suffered from severe lag (this is why a wired controller is recommended for the game).

Information also contributed by VVP