Burger King CD-i training program (found Burger King CD-i FMV training game; 1996-1997)

Burger King logo.

Status: Found

Date found: 29 Nov 2021

The Burger King CD-i training program, also known as Burger King Operations Training, is a series of CD-i full-motion-video training games that were tested at various Burger King locations across the United States in the mid-1990s. Only two articles and a single comment on the YouTube channel FrameRater have verified the existence of the training game. Having been described as full-motion video-based, it is presumed that it would train the employee in various scenarios at Burger King. Due to the fact that the two articles that make mention of the CD-i game as being in a testing state and not being rolled out until late 1997, it is unknown if the training game was ever sent out to any Burger King location.

Background

The Phillips CD-i was released in 1990 and was a result of a collaboration between Sony and Phillips. In order to set itself apart from the competition, the CD-i tried to be more of a home entertainment system as opposed to solely a console. Because of this, the CD-i was priced at $1,000 USD, but it did not help with sales. The Phillips CD-i faced competition from the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn. In the mid-1990s, the focus of the CD-i shifted focus from solely a home entertainment system to that of trying to help companies make use of it. This did not help, and the CD-i was discontinued in 1998.^[1]

The Game

On December 16th, 1996, the Orlando Business Journal published an article about a deal that had reached between Winter Park's Media Design Group Inc and Burger King to develop and roll out an interactive training game on the Phillips CD-i. It would first be piloted at 9,000 locations before being rolled out in the entire chain by late 1997. The article further goes on to explain that the game would allow employees to answer questions on the screen.^[2] On February 24th, 1997, The Irish Times also published an article about Burger King implementing an interactive based training game, except in this article it says that Burger King had already started using it in some locations, but more would be implemented later that month.^[3] As of now, these are the only known publications that even mention the existence of the Burger King CD-i training game.

Existence

On January 3rd, 2021, YouTuber FrameRater uploaded a video titled "Don't Risk Buying a Philips CD-I," in which he reviews the system in question. A comment left by a YouTuber by the name of "Michelle L" had recommended that FrameRater review the Burger King game for the CD-i, and they had recalled seeing it in the early 2000s. YouTuber "LSuperSonicQ" had further inquired into the initial comment and had searched for any mention of the game, which eventually yielded the Irish Times and Orlando Business Journal articles. Aside from the two mentioned articles and the comment from Michelle L, there was not much to go off of that could definitively prove the existence of the Burger King training game.

On November 27th, 2021, a dump of this program by KailoKyra obtained from the HomeComputerMuseum in Helmond, Netherlands was added to Redump, a disc preservation project. This, therefore, confirms its existence, however, the files that were added to Redump aren't playable. A couple of days later on November 29th, 2021, KailoKyra uploaded the fully playable version of the program to the Internet Archive.^[4]