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Comment by actually_a_dog | Hacker News Reader

Oregon Trail, Lemonade Stand, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego were basically my holy trinity of educational games. The other educational game I remember, which was probably far more important than the three of these put together was some random typing game. I had a keyboarding speed of around 80wpm before I hit high school from playing that one.

BTW, you can still play them here:

* https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990

* https://archive.org/details/msdos_Lemonade_Stand_1999

* https://classicreload.com/where-in-the-world-is-carmen-sandi...

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The Learning Company stuff absolutely boosted my vocabulary (and ability to solve word puzzles).

Treasure Mountain - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tTrNVwAKtLk

Treasure Cove - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jF5s9_GFQPI

And a few more random memories:

The Incredible Machine - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pTbSMKGQ_rU

Pirates! Gold - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3BRS331lGc0

Battle Bugs - I guess what would now be RTS? But with a lot of tactical / positioning elements. So really typical 90s "trying to figure this new type of game out" - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HKGHlL5jySU&t=8m17s

Ancient empires was my favourite of the learning company titles. Had a soundtrack of chiptune classic songs including a gnossiene by Erik Satie that I first encountered in this educational dos game

You can play these in your browser now, although there's no guarantee how well they will work. Leave a review! The emulator settings can be tweaked individually for these, and the emulator software itself is getting updated all the time, so it helps the admins and devs know what to focus on.

Treasure Mountain https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Treasure_Mou...

Treasure Cove https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Treasure_Cov...

The Incredible Machine https://archive.org/details/the_incredible_machine_1992

Pirates! Gold https://archive.org/details/msdos_Pirates_Gold_1993

Battle Bugs https://archive.org/details/msdos_Battle_Bugs_1994

Civilization. Nothing taught me more history, hands down.

Bunch of leaders to read about, bunch of civs, techs, cities, wonders.

Not to mention the tradeoffs of different government types.

A lot of the differences between _____ types in this game were based on the opinions of the authors.

The difference between zero and history-with-bias is more important than the difference to neutral-bias, which a kid probably wouldn't be equipped to unpack the nuance of anyway.

I once tried to make a socialist paradise in SimCity, but the game moved all my town's people out due to high taxes.

There was recently a story here about sim city that discussed some of these limitations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27593081. If you search for sim city on HN you’ll find several more. In addition to emergent functionality that we don’t foresee when we create a program there’s this other side of impossible functionality that we also embed in the design that we sometimes don’t realize.

Are there any real-life approximations of this situation?

Honestly, just the idea that there are tradeoffs is a lesson worth teaching. That's a lesson plenty of people haven't learned.

In Civilization, implementing Democracy reduces governmental corruption in all cities by 100%. It will more than double your GDP unless you were already a Republic.

It is not possible to be competitive in research production unless you are a Republic or a Democracy, which is an interesting interpretation of classical history.

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing? I remember an Amiga version which had a mode where had a crude visualization of racing other cars as you typed.

We had to do weekly sessions in Mavis all the way through middle school. I checked a couple years ago and they were still around.

That was the one for me, PC AT version but it had the racing game as well.

Tied with Turbo Pascal for best lifetime payoff on an EXE running on that computer.

Commander Keen has to get the ribbon for hours spent, though, unless it was Empire (hat tip to Walter Bright!)

I recently translated the original 1971 Oregon Trail BASIC source code into Ink (https://unfold.studio/stories/10782/). It was my first time working with GOTO statements and hopefully my last.

How about Number Munchers?

Number Munchers was the SHIIIIT! Thanks for the flashback!

Zoombinis was set theory for kids

There was also Solomon's Key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon%27s_Key.

Breaking down problems and solving real time puzzles was educational in its own way.

Oh God, that game. Ugh, the music of the NES version is permanently seared into my mind.

The game that taught me typing was trying to respond quickly to trolls in WoW

IRC

My typing speed tripled.

Carmen San Diego was just so good

if you prefer the macintosh version: https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/mecc/oregon-trail.html

I played the very old SimCity

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