Hancock had also developed Tabletop Jr., a children's version, and soon he and Osterweil began playing with the idea of creating a database tool built around bits of data that kids could easily digest and manipulate, such as pizza toppings and facial and body features. Which is all very interesting when you consider that Zoombinis was actually an adaptation of Tabletop, a data visualization tool developed in the early 1990s by Chris Hancock, one of Osterweil's colleagues at the Cambridge, Mass.-based non-profit Technical Education Research Centers (TERC). "It was never to say, 'These are things kids must learn and we know we must teach them in this sequence.' We really were thinking about it as an entertainment game." "The goal was never to be curricular," Osterweil said. They allowed users to indulge their curiosity without the nagging requirement that they make their kids more competitive in school.
Games of the era, including Zoombinis, reflected that. "You just thought, 'There are interesting things I can do with this,'" he said. If you had a PC, you weren't yet using it to play all your CDs, pay your bills and telecommute. Only curious hobbyists were willing to invest $1,000 or more in the big, bulky units, said Scot Osterweil, one of Zoombinis' original co-developers.
#LOGICAL JOURNEY OF THE ZOOMBINIS CODE SOFTWARE#
Launched by the software firm Broderbund in 1996, the game appeared at a key time: just as computers were showing up in American homes, but before they became ubiquitous.Īt the time, PCs were expensive.
If it's possible to have nostalgic feelings for a piece of software, Zoombinis is the one to love.
#LOGICAL JOURNEY OF THE ZOOMBINIS CODE ANDROID#
6 on the Android and Apple app stores, with plans to release it soon for PC and Mac users. Well, the strange little logic game is back. Then it disappeared, its code languishing as a series of corporate owners neglected it and its former users discovered the charms and distractions of the World Wide Web. The beloved CD-ROM game appeared in 1996 and stuck around for a decade. If you grew up in the mid-1990s or early 2000s, you probably encountered that hallowed imaginary place at a friend's house after school while playing the cult classic computer game Logical Journey of the Zoombinis.
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