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| An early logo displays the original company name |
Yes, I'm playing and reviewing a couple of games meant for small children. The 1984 game Robot Odyssey, a puzzle game about programming robots personally interests me and makes discretionary whale status. As the first whale by educational software company The Learning Company (cofounded by Dr. Leslie Grimm and Atari's Adventure author Warren Robinett), I am doing an early retrospective of the games leading up to it.
Funded in part through the U.S. National Science Foundation, The Learning Company made educational computer games and primarily sold directly to public schools, and as such, focused on the Apple II which had quickly established dominance in the U.S. education market. They also were an early supporter of IBM's PCJr., as well as Atari computers, the TRS-80 CoCo, and Commodore 64.
Given that I'm well past the target audience for these games, and so are you, and it's hard to imagine anyone's kids wanting to play these old Apple II educational games nowadays, I'll skip the GABbing.
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| Corinne's age helps reckon a more precise chronology |
Magic Spells bears the early ALT logo on startup, and appears to be TLC's earliest extant title.
The game is just unscrambling words to open chests of gold. Type slow, because the game drops inputs if you type too fast. You get two tries per word, and a wrong guess will cost you some (and award the demon some). Some of the shorter spells, like "eols" and "erta" can be ambiguous to the correct unscrambling, but only one of them counts as correct.
After twenty spells the game ends.
The disk also includes a dictionary editor utility, as well as the option for students to type in a custom 20-word dictionary and challenge a classmate to play with it without saving it to disk. I say there's a zero percent chance anyone ever used this mode and didn't type in all curse words.
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| The bad ending |
Magic Spells was expanded and re-released in 1985, but we're not really concerned about that version. Nor is this early version substantial enough to bother numbering.
Game 362: Moptown
I found this by accident while searching Internet Archive for Moptown Parade and Moptown Hotel, and its provenance is a bit of a puzzle.
Is Moptown a budget compilation of Parade and Hotel? Perhaps a pirate compilation? Or did Moptown, in fact, come first?
I believe, due to a few factors, such as the inclusion of the old ATL logo at the start, that Moptown is in fact the original game, and that after the company rebranded itself, its programs were divvied up between the two better-known separate products.
Moptown is home to creatures called 'moppets," who are defined by four physical attributes.
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Moppets can be tall or short, fat or thin, red or blue, and "bibbit" (big nose and feet) or "gribbit" (small nose, small feet, and a tail). Each of the 11 games tests pattern recognition and logic skills, using these traits as the basis for puzzles which escalate in complexity.
Game 1: Make My Twin
Make My Twin just has you identify a Moppet's traits and enter them into the computer to make a clone. A simple introductory game.
Game 2: Who's Different?
Who's Different has you pick the odd moppet out of a lineup and identify the differing trait.
An alternate, more difficult game mode has you instead look at four moppets, all different, and pick the one who has a trait that none of the other three have.
Game 3: What's the Same?
Game 4: Who Comes Next?
This is like the first game, but with the added challenge of pattern recognition. Moppet lines always take one of three patterns; ABABA, ABBAB, or AABAA.
Game 5: Moptown Parade
Make a parade of moppet clones following the rule that each moppet must differ from the one behind it in exactly one way. Teach kids about sequences and celebrate diversity at the same time!
Other options let you require 2, 3, or 4 differences. The latter choice means you'll just have the same two moppets alternating four times.
Game 6: Who's Next Door?
We start entering the realm of logic puzzles as you must deduce the traits of the moppet living in the lower-right apartment. The moppets in the upper two differ by one trait; the moppets in the bottom two differ by the same trait.
Game 7: Secret Pal
Guess the traits of a secret moppet and it will reveal how many are correct. It's like Mastermind but much easier.
Game 8: Change Me
Transform a moppet into the target in three steps, changing two traits at a time. You might need to stop and think for this one, as the third moppet has to differ from both the one before it and the one after it in exactly two ways.
Game 9: Clubhouse
Now we're getting toward the difficult end of Moptown's puzzle spectrum. The clubhouse has strict rules about who can and can't join, and your goal is to deduce these rules in as few guesses as possible. Teach kids about logical deduction and size/color/race discrimination!
You can play with one rule (e.g. no fatties allowed!) or two rules (tall gribbits only!), and the latter is much more difficult.
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| The tall and thin models' club |
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| Can you guess the rules? |
One optimal strategy is that if your first moppet is accepted, the next one to admit should differ by one trait, but if rejected, then the next should differ by three. This ensures that either one of your first two moppets is admitted (and you know both traits must belong to the admitted one), or if both are rejected, then you'll know their shared trait is not a requirement. It should not take more than six guesses.
Game 10: Moptown Map
Things take a dark turn here. We already saw the exclusionary Moptown Clubhouse, but Moptown even has discriminatory housing policies!
Each row and column has two secret rules concerning who is allowed to live there, and in the end, each of the 16 moppet combinations has exactly one house where they belong. Solving this is a lot like Sudoku, though it might not always be possible to solve without some guessing.
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| Red bibbits, blue gribbits, subprime gribbits, blue bibbits |
Game 11: Moptown Hotel
Finally, Moptown Hotel is a two-player competitive game where you take turns placing moppets into rooms, and the default rule is that moppets must differ from each adjacent guest by exactly one trait. Extra cash is awarded for squeezing moppets in spaces already adjacent to multiple guests, and if you can fit all 16 of them - probably impossible without deliberate cooperation - you both get a $1000 bonus!
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| One possible solution |
If my chronology is correct and Moptown was the original game, then Moptown Parade, aimed at children ages 6-10, was a compilation of the first five Moptown games plus Clubhouse as the one concession to anything resembling a logic puzzle. The remaining, more difficult ones were distributed as Moptown Hotel, aimed at ages 9-13.
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Parade has one new game; Make My Opposite, which is just Make My Twin with the rules inverted.
Hotel has two new games; Spot Me and Whose Birthday?
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Well, sort of. Spot Me is just the alternate mode from Who's Different where you pick the moppet with the unique trait. This mode is absent from Moptown Parade entirely. Cheapskates.
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Whose Birthday has you guess which moppet has a birthday party today. Each wrong guess gives you a clue, and docks you a birthday present.
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As I said, I'm not going to bother rating this; the sole purpose of playing was to better inform my understanding of the company's design history through its early games. Most of these games are trivial, but Moptown Map was kind of fun.
The next games in our Learning Company retrospective involve Warren Robinett's design, and the influence from his Adventure is quite evident.
Wow the Moptown series is fascinating to me as somebody who grew up playing Zoombinis in computer lab in elementary school. If you're not familar, Zoombinis is an educational game developed by Broderbund where you guide a group of little blue, round-headed critters with randomly-generated traits through a linear series of logic game set-pieces. The set-pieces have very similar gameplay to the clubhouse game in Moptown, but with a more absurdist, fantasy-racism flavor; for example, two literal cliff faces who are both allergic to different Zoombini traits and can sneeze Zoombinis who try to cross the wrong bridge to their death. The game also mixes the fantasy-racism formula up sometimes, for example with a troll who demands your Zoombinis make him a pizza, but is very picky about his toppings and a little murderous when he doesn't get what he wants. Anyway, aside from more flavor and variety to the logic games, the main way Zoombinis builds on the Moptown clubhouse formula is through it's attrition mechanic. As I mentioned, incorrect guesses get your Zoombinis murdered left and right, and your reduced ranks carry over to the next logic puzzle, and the next. The ultimate goal of the game is to get as many Zoombinis as you can through this dangerous journey and safely guide them to their new homeland, Zoombiniville.
ReplyDeleteCoincidentally, Broderbund along with the Zoombinis IP was later bought up by the Learning Company, and they've made a few more games in the series. It was fascinating reading your post and coming to the realization that what I thought was a bizarre and unprecedented fantasy-racism logic game is actually part of a genre that stretches back to at least the early 80's. I can't imagine it's a coincidence either, there's enough similarities that it seems unlikely that Zoombinis wasn't influenced by Moptown, especially as they both came out of the same little educational corner of the games industry.
Robot Odyssey is great. I remember playing it on my Apple II clone and having a lot of fun.
ReplyDeleteThe concept of the game is great and I always check out modern releases in the same genre, but nothing so far seems to capture what I liked about the original.