My mom has been doing spring cleaning at my childhood home. The latest find was old computer games I used to play. My mom was planning on donating them to Goodwill, but I insisted she give them to me instead. I’m not sure if I ever plan on playing them again, but I don’t think I can get rid of them. I’m not sure if they would even work still considering on the disc itself it lists Windows 97/98 as being the running system. I wanted to share the computer games that made up my childhood.
Carmen Sandiego Math Detective
I loved the Carmen Sandiego computer games! My dad bought them for me because technically they were educational. I liked the overall plot of the games and how the main goal was to capture Carmen even though Carmen would escape every single time. I have played through each Carmen Sandiego computer game at least five times throughout my childhood.
Backyard Baseball 2003
My dad bought me this game to help teach me the rules of baseball. I would watch Minnesota Twins games with my dad and constantly be asking questions about the game, the rules, and the players. In the Backyard sports games, it would take professional players and make them into little kids. I could pick the players I wanted to create my team to get into the World Series. The Minnesota Twins player included in this game was pitcher, Brad Radtke who played on the Twins from 1998 – 2006. I never played any of the other Backyard sports games, but I know there was one for Football as well.
Clue (1998 Hasbro Interactive)
This Clue game freaked me out as it was very dark. Once you navigated around the Boddy mansion and started accusing people, it would show a clip of the person you accused murdering Mr. Boddy with the weapon. I probably shouldn’t have been playing this game at a young age, but me and my friend had the best time. We would always turn out all the lights and play this game in my basement.
The Game of Life (1998 Hasbro Interactive)
Besides Clue, I would always play Life. I tried to have the most babies in one go through of the game. I liked how I could customize my character and change the color of the car I drove. I found myself constantly playing this interchangeably with Clue.
Computer games from the 90s were my jam. As mentioned, I don’t think I can get rid of them because of the many memories attached to playing through each game. I may try and buy a CD drive and run them on my Windows 7 laptop to see if they will play. Let me know in the comments if you still have any old computer games and if so, have you gotten rid of them or keep them to play later.
Bizarre Brunette 
My brother and I had an Arthur computer game we played a lot of, a Tonka truck game, and Rollercoster Tycoon 1 and 2. Good times!
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Arthur! I had the picture books, but not sure if I had the computer game. Rollercoaster Tycoon is fun. I miss putting a CD into a computer and waiting for it to install.
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I had a Carmen San Diego game too growing up. I remembering it being at a higher grade level so I found it challenging. I also had a game called Math Blasters that’d I play a lot. My parents were into buying educational games.
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Same. I still credit Jump Start Typing into making me a faster typer.
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I was obsessed with these! Spy Fox was also a fave.
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Love Spy Fox! I played Spy Fox Dry Cereal last year and it was such a blast from the past.
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I didn’t play any Carmen Sandiego games as a kid, but as far as The Learning Company goes, I really dug Gizmos & Gadgets. I got to learn about things like air drag and wind resistance long before the other kids as a result.
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Educational games were so much fun!
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I myself tend not to formally review educational games (even bad ones) because I feel doing so would be missing the point. It would kind of be like reviewing a textbook as a piece of literature; it’s not a fair apples-to-apples comparison using my metrics, I feel. Nonetheless, some of them are indeed fun to play.
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Yeah I don’t really review Educational games on here either. It was more from my childhood that I would play them, so I figured it was worth bringing them up in this post.
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Granted, I have half-jokingly referred to the Zero Escape trilogy as some of the greatest educational games out there, although in those cases, it’s more like the scientific concepts it uses are explained and incorporated into the plot really well. It’s more like a science-fiction narrative that you can really learn from, and given what an infamously terrible decade the 2010s was for science-fiction, they really stood out – especially in hindsight.
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Ha I remind these kinds of games! I think I got that Life game from a cereal box as a kid too. 😀 Nice list! 😀
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Yess cereal boxes used to give out such cool prizes!
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Omg, I played Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego and The Game of Life too. We also loved Rollercoaster Tycoon and wish we still had it to play. I think you can download apps for some of these now, but it doesn’t feel quite the same.
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The apps are definitely not the same…
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My first PC games were: Rollercoaster Tycoon, which I have re-bought on Steam and got the deluxe upgrades off the internet (much better than the app version); Transport Tycoon which I’ve used to get the deluxe version off the internet; Theme Hospital for which I own its spiritual successor Two Point Hospital on Steam; and Dune II which I did manage to redownload but shows its age a bit, did however inspire me to read the book!
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It’s so fun to re-play older games!
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