Real talk: I think learning is always fun. (Yes, I am absolutely a Ravenclaw. Why do you ask?) But when it’s a literal game? Then it’s even better, especially when you’re a kid. That’s probably why there were so dang many fantastic '90s educational computer games — the rise of home computing (and, by extension, the rise of computing in the classroom) during the 1990s opened up a new world of possibilities, including tons of ways to make learning a blast for up-and-coming generations. And you know what? These games are still fun. (Yes, I say that as a fully grown adult.)
World Of JumpStart is an online gaming portal for kids where they can learn a lot of things while playing. The players are presented with The Jumpee Creator, an interactive menu where they are able to fully customize their in-game avatar, known as their Jumpee.
A lot of theeducational computer games from the ’90s were originally developed and released long before the decade began, which could be why many '80s babies hold a certain degree of fondness for them; many actually dated back to the decade in which we were born. Some were part of long-running series, while still more of them received a number of remakes and reboots as technology improved. Though the graphics on the computer games from the ’90s may be laughable now, just remember — once upon a time, they were considered the pinnacle of technological achievement.
Here is the video game “JumpStart 1st Grade”! Released in 1995 on Windows, it's still available and playable with some tinkering. It's an educational game, set in a graphics / art, math / logic, fantasy, music and reading / writing themes and it was released on Windows 3.x as well. Over 6000+ DOS/Windows and Console games preserved for future generations. ClassicReload was setup for preservation of 6,000+ old retro abandonware games and abandoned OS/interfaces that you can play DOS games online right in your web browser for education and research purposes. There is just something magical about the old DOS games that just.
So, in the spirit of nostalgia, here are 15 ’90s-era computer games that made learning incredibly fun. Most are available to play on the internet now, so in those cases, I’ve also included links to where you can find them — frequently either an app store or the Internet Archive’s glorious collection of browser-based, emulated DOS games.
Have fun, kids!
1. Number Munchers and Word Munchers
The Munchers series was created by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium — or, under a name with which you might be more familiar, MECC. I don’t know about you, but I have vivid memories of seeing those four letters scrawled across a huge number of the educational games I played at school. I mean, there’s even a Reddit thread called “Number Munchers is what computer time was all about.”
The Munchers series' conceit was simple: They taught kids the basics of math and grammar. Number Munchers was originally released in 1990 for the Apple II, while Word Munchers had arrived a few years earlier in 1985. Gameplay-wise, both series functioned kind of like a turn-based version of Pac-Man; the object was to “eat” all of the numbers or words that correspond to the instructions on the screen (multiples of five, etc.) without getting caught by a Troggle.
What exactly are Troggles? No idea, but they're insatiable.
2. Math Blaster!
The original Math Blaster! was released in 1983 by the now-defunct developer Davidson & Associates, but it wasn’t until the ’90s rolled around that the series really hit its stride. Between 1990 and 1999, a whopping 20 games were released in the Blaster Learning System — and somewhat astonishingly, a few more follow-ups trickled out between 2000 and 2008. Math wasn't the only subject addressed by the series; Reading Blaster!, for example,taught language arts. A Science Blaster! Jr. was also released at one point, but due to lack of popularity, it was the only entry in the series to tackle science-based topics.
Math Blaster! is available to play online now; additionally, a bunch of ports of the math-teaching game arrived as Android apps in October of 2013, so the series appears to be alive and well, if somewhat frozen in time.
3. Scooter’s Magic Castle
Like many early computer games, Scooter’s Magic Castle consisted of a relatively large environment full of what we now call mini-games. Released under Electronic Arts’ EA*Kids umbrella in 1993, the game involved players either assuming the role of or simply helping out an elf-like creature wearing a blue tunic, red sneakers, and a red baseball cap turned backwards (the '90s!) as they worked their way through a variety of activities. These activities were designed to teach everything from problem-solving to typing; you could even make terrible MIDI music by jumping up and down a set of colorful stairs.
Scooter's Magic Castle also has a super earworm-y theme song, so if you now have it stuck in your head for the rest of the day… sorry. My bad.
4. The Carmen Sandiego Series
No list of educational ‘90s computer games would be complete without an appearance by this mysterious, trench-coated criminal mastermind. The four major entries in the series — Where in the World, Where in the U.S.A., Where in Europe, and Where in Time — were all first released by Broderbund between 1985 and 1989; the deluxe versions of Where in the World and Where in the U.S.A., however, came along in 1992 and 1993, and as a result, it’s those versions that most ’90s kids remember so fondly. There was no better way to learn geography — and hey, Where in the World deluxe is playable at the Internet Archive, so it looks like I just figured out what I’m doing with myself this weekend.
Fun fact: A Facebook version of Where in the World was available to play in 2011; I’m not sure how I missed it, but it stuck around until 2012.
5. Kindercomp
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I’m really dating myself here, but Kindercomp is probably the first computer game I remember playing. Initially released in 1983 by Spinnaker Software Corporation, it was exactly the kind of game that appealed to very young children: It consisted of six mini-games that taught kids their way around a keyboard by having them draw pictures, match pairs, and other do simple activities. The one I remember is the 1984 version, but the Internet Archive has a whole bunch of ’em available, so knock yourselves out. If you have a kid in your life who's around 3 years old, it might be a fun time to play with them!
6. Mario Teaches Typing
As a child in a house full of gamers, naturally I adored Mario Teaches Typing, which first hit the scene in the early '90s. One of a number of educational Mario games released between 1988 and 1996, it put the pixelated plumber to good work teaching us how to type. Hitting the correct key would prompt Mario to hit blocks, jump on Koopa Troopas, and more. Nintendo had almost no hand in the development of these games (a far cry from the tight hold the company tends to keep on the reins of its properties nowadays), but they proved popular all the same.
7. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing
Mario was second perhaps only to Mavis Beacon in the world of beloved typing programs — and what’s more, it’s still around: The first version debuted in 1987, and it has remained in production, continuing to get new and improved updates, pretty much ever since. You can download it for free right now if you’d like.
I was, by the way, absolutely devastated to learn recently that Mavis Beacon isn’t a real person. She was invented to give a face to the program in an era when human people weren't regularly associated with computer and video games. 1985's The Chessmaster 2000had shown how effective putting a real person on the cover of a computer game could be; the wizard on the box was played by actor Will Hare. Mavis became the next incarnation of this strategy, as depicted by Renee L'Esperance.
8. 3D Dinosaur Adventure
Launched by Knowledge Adventure in 1993, 3D Dinosaur Adventure was little more than a glorified encyclopedia specializing in what we knew about dinosaurs at the time (much of which has since been determined to have been terribly, terribly wrong, even if the brontosaurus did make a triumphant comeback in 2015). That didn’t matter, though, because dinosaurs.
Also contained within 3D Dinosaur Adventure was a mini-game called 'Save The Dinosaurs' — which, to be perfectly honest, was downright terrifying. It required players to make their way through a series of maze-like hallways to find and rescue 15 types of dinosaurs before time ran out — and by 'before time ran out,' I mean 'before the comet that wiped out all of the dinosaurs crashed into the Earth, while you and the dinos were still on the planet.'
No pressure.
9. Odell Lake
Like the Munchers series, Odell Lake was created by MECC and therefore a fixture for many an elementary school computer lab. It debuted in the early 1980s, but it stuck around for long after that; it’s why so many of us ’90s kids remember playing it when we were young.
In all honesty, it wasn’t really that exciting — all you did was swim around as a fish, trying to figure out whether you should eat, ignore, or run away from every other fish you encountered. I’m also not totally clear on why this was classified as an educational activity; Giant Bomb suggests it taught kids about food chains and predator/prey relationships, but I... clearly did not get that takeaway from it. But hey, I suppose survival skills are important, too, right?
Odell Lake is a real place, by the way; it’s in Oregon. Just, y’know, FYI.
10. Reader Rabbit
You know the old saying, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? That’s pretty much the Reader Rabbit series in a proverbial nutshell: It’s so effective at teaching kids to read and write that it’s survived all the way since the first game launched in 1984. There's a huge list of Reader Rabbit titles scattered throughout educational computing history; at the series' height in the late '90s, six to seven titles in the line were being released each year. The output has since tapered off, of course, but the remarkable thing is that it's still around.
The last major PC release for a Reader Rabbit game was in 2010, but a number of titles have debuted since then as iOS apps. Many of the games are also, of course, available to play online courtesy of the Internet Archive.
11. Mixed-Up Mother Goose
Mixed-Up Mother Goose didn't have a ton of replay value; the point was to sort out all of the nursery rhymes that had gotten 'mixed up' and put them back in order, so after you did that once, your work there was done. However, the world in which the game existed was so delightful that I played it over and over again as a small child. Released by Sierra in 1987, with a handful of remakes appearing at regular intervals throughout the ’90s, it was a point-and-click adventure game that encourages problem-solving; it also gets bonus points for having tons of relatively diverse avatar options — something which was even rarer back then than it is now.
12. Super Solvers: Treasure Mountain
I’ll be honest: I actually have no recollection of playing 1990’s Treasure Mountain, Treasure Cove, or any of the other Treasure titles in this series. Many other people seem to remember these games fondly, though, so I think they deserve an inclusion here. Like many educational games, 1990's Treasure Mountain — a creation of The Learning Company, like the Reader Rabbit series — involved solving riddles that led you to keys that unlocked each successive level. You also collected treasure as you went, returning it to the chest at the top of the titular mountain once you got there. A prize was awarded for depositing the treasure back into the chest.
Treasure Mountain and Treasure Cove both focused on general reading comprehension and basic math skills; however, other entries in the Super Solvers series tackled more specialized skill sets, including deductive reasoning and logic.
13. The Dr. Brain Series
Admittedly, I never played the fourth game in Sierra On-Line's long-running Dr. Brain series, and I wasn’t a big fan of the third — but the first two? Classic. The Castle of Dr. Brain, released in 1991, and the follow-up, 1992’s The Island of Dr. Brain, was a step up from a lot of the other puzzle-solving games out there; they were geared toward slightly older kids, so there was more to each puzzle than simply picking a matching shape or selecting the next number in a sequence. We’re talking about intense logic puzzles that might stump even some adults.
Sierra merged with another educational game company, Bright Star Technology, following the release of The Island of Dr. Brain; the franchise was then handed over to a team from Bright Star, which might explain why 1995's The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain and 1996's The Time Warp of Dr. Brain were so different from the first two entries in the series.
14. Eagle Eye Mysteries
Like Scooter’s Magic Castle,1993’s Eagle Eye Mysteries and 1994’s Eagle Eyes Mysteries in London came to us courtesy of the now sadly defunct EA* Kids division of Electronic Arts. Unlike Scooter’s Magic Castle, though, they were meant for an older crowd. The games followed siblings Jake and Jennifer Eagle as they solved mysteries throughout first their hometown, then in London — not unlike a modernized, digital version of Encyclopedia Brown. If you were a pint-size fan of whodunnits, this was the game for you; it helped you learn how to piece together different pieces of information until a complete picture emerged.
15. Oregon Trail
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Ah, yes: Oregon Trail, the game responsible for countless deaths by dysentery, many drownings of oxen who tried and failed to ford the river, and a plethora of memes. For anyone who grew up playing it, it's the gift that keeps on giving.
Speaking of people who grew up playing it, perhaps an unexpectedly large swathe of the population falls into this category. Originally developed in 1971 and launched by MECC in 1974, roughly 20 versions of the game have been released since then — the most of which, believe it or not, arrived in 2018 as a handheld game similar to the Tiger Electronics games a lot of '80s kids grew up playing. Ostensibly, it taught kids what it was like to travel the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon in 1848; practically speaking, though, it mostly taught us about frustration.
16. Putt-Putt Travels Through Time
Putt-Putt Travels Through Time could solely be responsible for your history knowledge today. The game was released in 1997 but is the fourth of seven games published by Humongous Entertainment in the “Putt-Putt” series. Any child of the ’90s remembers aiding Putt-Putt on his time travel adventure to find his history report, calculator, lunchbox, and his adorable puppy Pep. Kids of the ’90s will also remember the, shall I say, repetitivetheme song: “Putt-Putt Travels Through TIIIIIIIIIIIIME' instantly in my head,” as one user puts it on Reddit.
17. Lemonade Stand
The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) is credited for creating this iconic business simulator game that inspired every ’90s kid to dream of becoming the most successful lemonade stand entrepreneur out there.
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Although it was released in the ’70s, the game made a name for itself and carried well on into the ’90s. If you want to relive that nostalgia that was Lemonade Stand, a Reddit user recommends playing a similar Lemonade Stand game on Cool Math Games, here.
18. Freddi Fish
I don’t know about you, but after playing Freddi Fish as a kid I had a newfound love of the ocean and, therefore, would nag my mother to take me to the beach. Freddi, the yellow fish, and Luther, her green fish friend, go on detective missions through all of the wonders of the ocean. Children had a chance to learn about vibrant coral reefs, sea caves, fish species, and so much more.
Freddi Fish was re-released on Steam, a gaming library, and one Reddit millennial described it as “a whole nostalgia adventure and it was just as great as [they] remember it being.”
19. Pajama Sam
Pajama Sam may not be an overly educational ’90s computer game, it did in fact teach kids to conquer their fears. Not only did Sam conquer his fear of the dark, but the character also offered other adventure and puzzle games. The developer and publisher, Humongous Entertainment, won more than 40 awards of excellence for it, and it became an iconic ‘90s game.
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