Brain was another DOS-era game designed to teach kids lessons through various science-themed puzzles. (The view would even change to display a little “For Sale” sign after the humans were driven out.)Īnother edutainment hit from Sierra On-Line, Castle of Dr. Hell, you could even switch views to see your ants crawling over the floor and kitchen of the human house. The game was surprisingly complex, with trackers for your castes (how many soldiers, breeders and workers you had), different views for your colony positions, different views for your nest, top-down strategic views, and even a look in the nearby house that your colony very quickly took over. It was more like a real-time strategy game than, say, SimCity, with the player helping a colony of black ants survive attacks from rival red colonies. Using some of the base framework and systems established by other Sim games, Maxis created a game where the entire object was to help an ant colony thrive. There was honestly nothing like it, and nothing since. Can you imagine any publisher that would take it on in its original form? Just imagine pitching a game like SimAnt in this day and age.
It was basically a more modern, science-forward take on Marble Madness. But what was great about it was its cartoon, kid-friendly aesthetic, an easy-to-understand approach to scientific terms and principles, and a very clear, appealing aesthetic for a game in 1993. You were also limited in how many balls you had, and you had to manage this while also controlling the power, friction and how much gravity the ball could have (if allowed). Some levels, for instance, restricted you to glass balls, so you had to be gentle to make sure you didn’t shatter the ball by going to fast or falling off ledges. It was effectively a puzzle-platformer where you had to navigate the ball either through certain doors, or to interact with various objects without reaching some kind of a fail state. You were stuck in a physics institute helping out Professor Blueman’s latest creation, which was basically a small screen with a ball on it. Binary Zoo’s 1993 game had a pretty straightforward hook. You don’t really see games like Wild Science Arcade any more, even though the idea behind them still works so well. Wild Science Arcade Image: YouTube (Squakenet) But even today, The Incredible Machine and many of its spiritual spin-offs - like Contrapation Maker, a 2014 game from some of the original Incredible Machine developers - are just as entertaining. The process of solving each level involved understanding how an environment functions from the top down, observing what objects created what effects and the impact that had on the rest of the “system”.
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Today, something like The Incredible Machine would be considered a great entry-level introduction for kids learning how to code.
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On par with Carmen Sandiego for the cleverness of its design, The Incredible Machine was a series of puzzles with simple objectives: get the pinball into the aquarium, get the cheese to the cat, launch the rocket, and other bizarre Rube Goldberg-type contraptions. One of the greatest pieces of edutainment ever made, although that’s underplaying its brilliance somewhat. The Incredible Machine Image: The Incredible Machine 3 (GOG)
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I’d love to see someone have another narrative-focused crack at the Dune franchise, especially with the recent success of the board game and the interest around the upcoming movie. The characterisation was excellent and memorable, with art design that was on point and a wonderful echo of the Dune universe. But more people have forgotten that in the very same year, Virgin Games turned the iconic franchise into an excellent point-and-click adventure for its time.
Most people remember Dune II, a foundational strategy game that would form the basis of the RTS genre in the early-to-late ’90s.
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