I remember the titles on the old Apple II machines at elementary school:
- Oregon Trail
- Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego
- Super Solvers (the best of the lot)
I also got a Windows 95 IBM Aptiva PC from my parents that had a lot of educational software. I can only remember some of it:
- The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain (I loved this game - it had logic programming, 3D spatial reasoning tasks, biology, ...)
- Encarta Encyclopedia virtual maze
- Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (I hated it; I learned to type when I got onto IGN Boards, EZboards, AIM, and IRC.)
- King's Quest VII (this counts as educational logic puzzles, right?)
- MechWarrior II (well, I considered it educational...)
I'm envious of kids today growing up with LLMs and vibe coding. I would have had a blast at that age with the tools we have today.
2 words: Family Computing. When that magazine showed up and there was something I could use on my Apple IIe, I would sit there (or kneel, actually, we had one of those 80s kneeling chair things) endlessly, even skipping meals or forgetting to go take a leak every once in a while. I discovered flow state in 5th grade and didn't even realize it.
I used to skip recess in elementary school to go write code in the computer lab; the teachers all knew me and would laugh out loud when I made the computer make a noise... until one day when I programmed the monophonic speaker to sound like it was polyphonic and out came the title theme from Terms of Endearment in all of it's 80s glory. I miss those days.
Man, mavis beacon teaches typing! I wonder if that ever actually did me any good.
Awesome, you're one of the few people who played nearly the same set of games I did. My favorite was probably The Island of Dr. Brain, though all of the Dr. Brain games were great as a kid.
One particularly hilarious part was right at the beginning of Island of Dr. Brain, back in the old-school days of manual-based copyright protection. The game would give you longitude and latitude coordinates, and you had to look them up in the manual to figure out where you were supposed to parachute. If you got it wrong, your character would just splash into the ocean.
I actually referenced The Island of Dr. Brain in something I made about a year ago. I don’t know if you played it, but it has a jigsaw puzzle as one of the mini-games. It was one of the most unusual jigsaw puzzles I’d ever seen: an animated jigsaw, where the entire image was a effectively looping "cinemagraph". One of the first things LLM-assisted projects I put together was a jigsaw puzzle game with about a dozen custom animated jigsaw puzzles. Link is in my profile.
This is a bit of a deep cut, but my most distinct memory of Super Solvers: Midnight Rescue in DOS was that it used the PC speaker to play “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” If you did anything that triggered a sound effect like jumping the music would immediately reset and start over. It was like a weird, primitive version of scratching a vinyl record as if you were some kind of amateur PC-speaker DJ. (and kind of the opposite of Dig-Dug)
I love HN for this.
I'll go digging for your game!