Back in the dark ages of the late '80s and early '90s, home computers were fairly rare. In those days, gamers were forced to take their gaming opportunities where they could. Outside the shelter of an arcade, that meant the edutainment computer games that came pre-loaded on the blocky Macs which lined the walls of your school’s computer lab. While the other kids were actually memorizing the home keys or boning up on their spreadsheet skills, educational computer games were helping a fledgling generation of gamers kill the time until the bell. Even if you didn’t grow up to terrorize people in Call of Duty or wander the historical streets of an Assassin’s Creed game, the odds are solid you played one of these '80s and '90s edutainment games while silently praying that the teacher didn’t come by to check your work.
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Who among us hasn't watched in dismay as the members of our wagon train slowly succumbed to the hardships of dysentery? Well, virtually, anyway. There was probably something to learn in Oregon Trail, but for most people the game was just a frantic side scroller with intermittent bouts of sweet 3D-hunting. Or rather, what passed for 3D in 1990.
In the decade between 1985 and 1995, geography and culture educational video game Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? sold more than 4 million copies, spawned two sequels, and was adapted game show. Even for kids who didn’t care about foreign cultures or geography (see: average children living in the United States during the '90s), Carmen Sandiego was a big hit thanks to its mystery-style delivery and clever wordplay. An entire generation of kids learned to appreciate puns thanks to the master thief Carmen Sandiego and her band of shady accomplices.
First released in 1989, SimCity slipped past most computer teachers for several years before they realized that the classic asset management title was simply too much fun for students. Before that time, students stumbled upon this gorgeous juggling act on their school’s Macs and promptly forgot all about the actual teaching going on around them. SimCity was unlike anything gamers had seen before. You couldn't really win or lose. There was no violence. You simply tried to create a world that could run under its own steam. Maybe that entirely novel format was how creator Will Wright’s ambitious little title went on to spawn its own genre of video games.
The Number Munchers series of games had something to entertain both math kids and word kids... and just those kids. Players guided a weird, square creature around a grid while avoiding monsters and chomping down on the answers to various equations and word games. Being tricked into doing math was never this much fun.
In its purest form, Math Blaster! is an educational version of Asteroids. Players are presented with a math problem and then barraged with a series of possible answers. Their job is to aim the cannon at the correct answer and blow it out of the sky. It was simple, addictive, and fun.
Only the earliest Mac aficionados will remember Reader Rabbit, a series of games released from the '80s onwards that tried to teach kids the value of language arts skills. The bright, primary colors and energetic characters of the game entertained children as young as preschoolers while also teaching them how to read.
Ultimately, Lemmings actually proved so popular that it crossed out of the computer lab and into the homes of lots of PC early adopters. Playing on the old (and patently false) notion that lemmings will walk ever-forward following the leader, the game handed players a weird assortment of tools and then demanded they guide a whole bunch of aggressively stupid lemmings safely past a series of life-ending hazards. Frustrating, creative, and brilliant, Lemmings was the beginning of a popular series of early video games.
Though the protagonist of Treasure Mountain!, the vaunted Super Seeker, was the star of a lot of games in the series, this 1990 entry is the one most people remember. Were you able to traverse Treasure Mountain and recover all of the priceless treasures that were stolen? The innovative puzzle-solving and matching gameplay never failed to entertain (at least until the bell rang).
There were few better ways for children to learn about ecosystems, the food chain, and the natural world than by playing as a hungry little fish in Odell Lake. Figuring out what to eat while avoiding hungry predators like otters and fisherman proved enchanting to children who accidentally found themselves with a much larger working knowledge of freshwater marine life.
Few educational games were as infectiously fun and truly educational as The Incredible Machine, Dynamix’s electronic Rube Goldberg machine. By building up some needlessly complex machine to accomplish a dreadfully simple task, kids learned to accomplish goals through creative methods while picking up a lesson or two about basic physics.
Towards the end of the '90s, Sierra put their cutesy little spin on the puzzle genre with the Dr. Brain series, a hybrid-puzzler that sought to teach kids to think in the abstract with help from an absent-minded little fella named Dr. Brain.
You can’t knock the ambition at the core of 1994’s Museum Madness, a game that put players in the shoes of a kid who’s working to help save a museum from some nebulous evil. Along with his trusty robot helper, players learned a crazy assortment of facts on topics ranging from geology to space travel.
Unless you grew up to become a paleontologist, odds are good that when you ran across the barely concealed dino-encyclopedia that was Dinosaur Adventure 3-D your interest was minimal. Well, until you ran across the “Save the Dinosaurs” mini-game hiding within the game’s menu, that is. Suddenly, Dinosaur Adventure 3-D went from a basic flash card game to a white-knuckle fight for heavily-pixelated survival.
In the totality of educational video games, music appreciation is one of the rarest focuses of gameplay. Thankfully for '90s kids, there was The Treehouse, an interactive music appreciation game that taught composition while entertaining kids with an interactive music maze, as well as a variety of other distractions.
For anyone who grew up reading Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, Eagle Eye Mysteries was a digital god send. Players walked around a small environment accompanied by one of the Eagle twins, Jake or Jennifer. The simple narrative paved the way for clever reading, writing, and puzzle-solving exercises.
If you picked up Spelunx as an adult, you’d likely think it was a total waste of time and money. Despite some cursory opening exposition, there was basically no point to the game beyond its simple point-and-click exploration. Still, though, there was magic in Spelunx, thanks to its imaginative mini-games and the clever way in which it shared its litany of facts.
