Early Disney adventure PC games!

Wow, sorry for the lack of updates lately, guys. School work has really taken a lot of my free time up. But I found a good solution/cop-out for a new post, putting up a paper I wrote for one of my library classes last term, which was for my Resources for Children class. We had to go back to something we remembered as impacting us as children and evaluate it. Since we were allowed to use anything, such as movies, music, books, etc, I choose some of the old Disney adventure games my dad bought for me when I was little! So everything below this paragraph is part of that paper. Hope you enjoy, and comment below if you had played these as kids and what you thought of them!

Back in 1984 or 1985, my dad came home with our first computer, a Tandy TRS-80. It had full color and ran in BASIC so you could make your own programs if you so wished. This machine was to start me on my road to having the passion for video games and computers that I do today. It wasn’t long before we started getting game to use on the computer, and my dad, I guess wanting to make sure the games I played weren’t a complete waste of time, chose some educational games from Sierra. I’ve remembered these games fondly for many years, and it was with great anticipation that I explored them again for the first time in over twenty years!

The first of these three games is Mickey’s Space Adventure, a graphical text-based adventure game that teaches kids about the planets and solar system. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, so I was really into this game when my dad bought it for me. It uses a basic graphical interface to select what you’d like to do instead of having to type it in; usually in these types of games you have to type something like “take lamp” or “go north” and the game will respond. But because of the younger audience, the game simplifies things by showing you the text options available to you on the bottom of the screen and you just need to select “go” and then select “north”. The game has a fun sense of exploration, and gives out some facts about each planet that will be useful when you need to figure out which one you’re going to. The premise is that Mickey and Pluto come across this spaceship, and once inside a computer asks them to find a crystal, whose shards have been scattered with one piece on each planet in our solar system.

The exploration is sometimes made a little less interesting in the way that it seems to repeat the landscape descriptions, but in slightly different ways, throughout many screens of a planet. Ex: “The planet is desolate and lonely” and “The cold planet seems rather desolate”, things like that. The images however are nice and large, each screen has a nicely drawn static image of Mickey and Pluto walking around and exploring. Some of the puzzles are better implemented than others, while some may be downright cryptic (if I try talking to an alien, I waste time and get thrown out, but if I just try to take his crystal, the game will tell me I can’t, but maybe I can trade and shows me my inventory).

This game has some tidbits about our planets and solar system that it hands out, making the game an “edutainment” title, though obviously it mixes in fantasy as well with aliens and spaceships. The player is in a way quizzed on the astronomical facts it gives, as the computer will tell you a hint about the next planet you need to visit. If the player chooses the wrong planet, when the ship lands it will give you some facts about the planet and then explain you’re in the wrong area. If you write down the facts it tells you, you’ll know when to come back. These facts are pretty much the only times you’ll find any actual educational elements happening in the game. I found the way it handled its rudimentary puzzles throughout to be a bit strange too, in that as long as you explore Mickey’s house in the beginning of the game you’ll find all the tools needed to solve all the puzzles, and the game only lets you use a tool when it can be used on that particular puzzle, so there’s no real challenge of figuring out what needs to be used where. I liked this game a lot as a kid, but I do feel that its design is a little questionable at times, and while it’s a good idea that they eliminated the need for typing, the interface they use is inconsistent from screen to screen, which seems sloppy.

Next up is Winnie-the-Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood. This game plays similarly to the Mickey game in that it’s a graphical text adventure where the user chooses from a series of options on screen instead of actually typing in their choices. The game seems a lot more refined and user friendly compared to Mickey, simply needing you to select “north” instead of first selecting “go” then selecting “north”. The user interface is much more consistent too, with options always following the same layout on the screen, something Mickey didn’t follow. The game world is a lot smaller than Mickey’s space adventure, only consisting of the Hundred Acre Wood, which is a 5 screen by 6 screen map as opposed to Mickey’s nine planets. The big improvement however is the stuff that’s packed into each area. Whereas I had a problem with Mickey’s emptiness on each planet, almost every screen of the Hundred Acre Wood has something of interest, whether it’s one of the characters, or the North Pole that Christopher Robin and friends found, or a hill that gives you the option of laying down and staring at the sky for a bit. It does a good job of representing the world of Winnie the Pooh.

The premise of the game is you have to help find all these items that belong to different people or places after they’ve been blown around by the blustery wind. The objects are never in the same place, giving the game a good replay factor. Two random events make the game more challenging; sometimes Tigger will appear and bounce you, making you lose whatever item you had been holding and putting you in a random place on the map, and sometimes the blustery wind will make all the items in the game change location with the exception of items you’ve already returned. Because of all this the game is certainly more entertaining and playable than Mickey’s Space Adventure was, though it’s also the only one of the three that was made to simply be an adventure game, not an edutainment game.

Lastly we have Donald Duck’s Playground. This is the only game of the three to actually move a character around on the screen, in this case Donald Duck, using a controller or keyboard. The object of the game is to do odd jobs around town to earn money, and then use that money to buy items for a playground for Huey, Dewey, and Louie. There’s four jobs you can do, hitting train switches to guide a train to the right destination, catching produce from a truck and sorting it into the correct crate, stocking toys on a shelf, and putting luggage going by on a conveyer belt onto the right airplane. Problem with the jobs is they kind of FEEL like jobs, not like a fun activity. Train one was the only one I thought was fun. I think I did the produce one a lot as a kid because it’s the easiest, but it also nets you the least amount of money. After you get enough money, you can go across the street to a few different shops and purchase items for the playground. You can then go to the playground where you control one of Donald’s nephews and can play on the equipment you’ve bought.

The main theme of this game is money management. The child playing can realize that while they can spend the money they get after one job right away on small things like gymnastics bars, but if they save up their money from a few jobs, they can spend it on the bigger and more interesting items, like large slides and trampolines. The lesson is pretty easy to understand when you look at the items available and want the good ones shown. The other part of money management that the game teaches is counting change; when you buy an item, you have to count your money to pay for it, then if there’s change needed you have to count how much change back you get.

My only real gripe about this game is that I’m not sure the reward is worth the time it takes to get there; playing on the playground that you’ve made is a little fun for a very short while, but it takes a lot of playing the various jobs to earn enough for them. The only job I thought was fun was when you’re in charge of flipping switches at a train station, the others didn’t really feel like I was playing a game so much as doing a repetitive task! I think that’s the game’s biggest failing, that the minigames sill need to be games, and the reward, the thing you’ve spent the game and your hard-earned fake money on, the playground itself, doesn’t feel like a good payout for everything you put in.

It’s hard to say whether or not these games “hold up” exactly, as video games are a unique medium when compared to movies, TV or books. They are a continually changing, growing and evolving medium, and these games practically come from the Dark Ages of videogames’ relatively short timeline. I honestly can’t imagine a child of this day and age struggling through much of any of these titles when there are so many other gadgets and devices that would provide more entertainment. As far as educational value, there’s the occasional teachings of our solar system and money management, but I’d say that it also does what many other games do, enables young kids to experiment, to try things and see if they work, to asses  a new digital world test its boundaries. These kinds of information and absorption, while not testable in a school textbook sense, still have important value to kids of the digital age. Of the three though, the Winnie-the-Pooh game still plays pretty well as far as graphical text adventures go. I still remember being six years old and drawing maps of the Hundred Acre Wood and feeling like I was really walking around there, meeting all these beloved characters. And I still felt a little of that when I sat down to play this time and mapped out the Hundred Acre Wood all over again, it really didn’t feel like a chore to track down all the items as I searched from one memorable location to the next, and I completely lost track of time as I played, the way any good game, or really any good book or movie as well, is likely to do.

All screenshots taken from Mobygames.com