With this free typing game - typing tutor you will learn to type and improve your typing skills. Typing Invaders is a REAL arcade game, in which you are escaping from invaders, shooting and trying to hit invaders. Play Paws for free online at Gamesgames.com! If your bark is worse than your bite, you better stay away from these woods. Play our free online Match 3 game! If your a fan of Mal and Uma from the popular Disney Channel Original movie Descendants 2, you will want to play Auradon Prep Quiz. Match 3 or more Descendants icons in a row and reach your highest score. Play anytime and anywhere! Desktop, tablet.
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. This is probably why there were so dang many fantastic educational '90s computer games — the rise of home computing (and, by extension, the rise of computing in the classroom) during the 1990s opened up a whole world of possibilities, including tons of ways to make learning a blast for the up-and-coming generations. And you know what? These games are still fun. And yes, I say that as a fully grown adult; don't knock going back and replaying the games you loved when you were 10 until you've tried it. Seriously.
As is often the case with the things we remember from the '90s, a lot of the games those of us who grew up during the decade filled our days with were originally developed and released long before the ‘90s. That's perhaps the reason '80s babies also have a certain degree of fondness for them; many of them 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 may be laughable now, just remember — once upon a time, they were the pinnacle of technological achievement.
So, in the spirit of nostalgia, here are 15 computer games from the ‘90s that made learning incredibly fun. Most of them are available to play on the internet now, so in these cases, I’ve also included links to where they can be found — 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; the company dated back to 1973 and was also responsible for games like the business simulator Lemonade Stand and the storytelling game Storybook Weaver.
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 Pacman; 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
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 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 reigns of its properties nowadays), but they proved popular all the same.
I’ll be honest, though: I actually learned how to type by frequenting chat rooms. As a result, I can type an impressive number of words per minute; however, I definitely don’t use the “correct” fingers. Ah well. Whatever works, right?
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 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 (everything is a lie). 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, reported Vice in 2015. 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. Vcds lite cracked version. 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 encourage 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. (And, y'know, it's still a problem decades later, so that's.. really saying something.)
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, were a step up from a lot of the other puzzle-solving games out there; they were geared towards 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 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.
SketchUp Pro 2016 16.0.19911 + Crack (WIN-MAC) SketchUp Pro 2016 16.1.1450 + crack (WIN-MAC) SketchUp Pro 2015 15.0.9351 (32-64Bit) + Crack (WIN-MAC) + Vray SketchUp Pro 2015 15.2.685 (32-64-Bit) + Patch (WIN-MAC) FULL SketchUp Pro 2014 + crack (win-mac) OR SketchUp Pro 2013 + crack (win-mac) V-Ray 3.4 For SketchUp 2017 + Crack V-ray adv 2.00. Sketchup 2016 32 bit crack.
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-sized 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. A valuable skill to have, I feel.
15. Oregon Trail
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 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, believed 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.
Also: Never ford the river. Always caulk your wagon and float it.
Your oxen will thank you.
Some of you may be too young to know what I’m talking about, but Paws Party was pretty cool. You probably won’t be able to find any information on it except anecdotes on various forums about playing a typing game about inviting animals to a shindig (one of which perhaps exemplifies how poor of a job it did at teaching the English language), but it did have a profound impact on my life. Compared to its contemporaries like Mario Teaches Typing, it was quite boring. It did, however, also teach me two important things: 1) I was pretty good at typing, and 2) cheating was fun.
I guess it wasn’t cheating so much as it was taking advantage of the game; if you typed roughly half the sentence placed before you and hit enter, the game would consider it done and, affording errors, would give you an inhuman GWAM, or gross words a minute. My teacher at the time (perhaps with her inability to comprehend technology and what it meant to use a keyboard) simply thought 500 GWAM was pretty good for a 3rd grader.
It seems like that was the only way to enjoy our typing lessons. Jamming out words and getting Paws’ party to actually happen wasn’t terribly difficult, but it was pretty interesting seeing who could intuit the proper breaking point of each sentence. It was a gamble each time as prematurely hitting enter would mean a hit in your GWAM, and our inter-class competition wouldn’t allow anything less than perfection. Not until later when we got fun typing games (no, not Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing) did we start to do things right.
But those typing games were always a hit, and it wasn’t just because they were thinly veiled educational products that were as close to a bonus indoor recess as we were going to get. Even faced with the prospect of playing Oregon Trail or that game with all the minigame puzzles in it, it was still a tough call as to what we were going to play. I have a feeling it’s because there’s something in the act of typing against some declining resource (time, health, party invitations, etc.) that speaks to us in a surprisingly primal way.
This is, of course, not an original notion. Just this morning, a post by Dave Cook over at VG247 detailed what it’s like to be part of the early transitional generation between the technologically illiterate and the “Digital Native.” I was on the receiving end of that transition with a predilection for things with screens and circuits, but I can still sympathize with his struggles because I know so many people like him. His write-up is called “Exploring the magnetic appeal of typing games” and is a fun read, but it definitely doesn’t explore much of anything except the timeline of typing video games. (You should still read it, though.)
He does, however, touch on it briefly: “I think it’s a real feat to take something that is now so natural and turn into something so enjoyable and challenging. Typing is – for many of us – a similarly essential part of everyday living, just like our ability to take a breath or walk.” But what does it mean for something to be natural to us? Likening it to breathing or walking seems like an apt comparison, but what is it about something so learned to become innate that makes it interesting?
Words, I believe, are the most efficient representation of pure thought we have. Hand gestures are vastly speedier but are also interminably vague; illustrations take time and some minimum level of skill; and other forms such as sculpture and music and film take resources and time and, once again, skill. That’s not to say words can’t be similarly demanding of your dwindling hours and already over-taxed brain, but you can butcher a sentence and still usually get the message across whereas drawing a squashed spider for a sun can barely suffice for an accident report let alone detailing the immense beauty of Swedish lake.
Something anchored so deep within us can easily tap into our other core components. Much like how low-level hardware can quickly access other base parts like raw memory locations and I/O ports, something so ingrained like the utilization of a language can speak to our composite existence. Words can incite tears, start wars, and spark love. Words can even get you in a competitive mindset.
And what faster way to get your words out than typing. As digital natives, it can often feel like your brain is pouring out directly from the tips of your fingers and somehow showing up on your screen (though other times it may also feel like even 10 hands couldn’t possibly get your overactive prosaic mind under control). When you’re on a writing tear, it’s exhilarating and feels like you’re about to explode with possibilities. And when you’re stopped up, it feels like your entire brain has seized up, dammed up by an army of brain beavers.
It’s a primal part of our lives now. Typing, that is; words have always been a part of humanity, even when they were nothing more than splashes of berry juice on a cave wall. And like any other fundamental part of our being, it can be the basis of many competitive or leisurely endeavors. Hangman, crossword puzzles, and word searches are still played today. Wheel of Fortune has been airing for over 30 years now.
This works because it is such a low-level component for being a person. Communication is the basis for relationships, business, and most of our good time jollies. Much like walking is natural to us, many of our competitive sports involve running. And the purer we get—the closer we get to the basest form of locomotion—the more it grabs us by the collar and shakes us awake. This is why the 100-meter dash is one of the most popular events at the Olympics; people want to find out who is the best at simply being.
That’s why even bone-dry implementations of typing games are inherently fun, such as with Mavis Beacon, the gaming equivalent of unsauced pasta. We are putting a pure representation of ourselves out on the line and testing it. How fast can you actuate your utility for being known? Are you better at being human than the person next to you? Those games like Typing of the Dead set a baseline, challenging you with a standard. It’s a line in the sand saying you must be this good to exist, this tall to be a person.
Meeting some expectation can only get you so far, though. Records are made to be broken—or something like that. There’s this fun little HTML5 game that I came across when I was looking at native browser game frameworks, and this was a demo. It’s called Z-Type and you have to type corresponding words to destroy ships, so big ships require big words. There’s no end and no bar to overcome. It’s simply you trying to be better than what you were a year ago or yesterday or one minute ago. After all, what’s more competitive than and more primal than proving you’re a better person than you were before.
Paws Typing 90s
I suppose that’s why Notch’s Drop typing game made such a big splash. Rather than type sentences, it just asks you to type letters of incomplete words you’ve yet to fully see or comprehend. Spiraling further into some void and faster towards an inevitable end, it strips you down to a stark realization that you trying to representation yourself is a poorly optimized process. Rather than testing the tools in your toolkit, it’s asking you to test each drill bit and each nail and get down to the lowest circuit of your fleshy machine.
Paws Party Typing Game
Or at least that’s my take on the whole thing. It’s something I’ve been marinating on for quite some time now. What makes a sport or game popular and compelling? There must be some reason certain activities seem to have a direct line to our core and tickle away at our sense of intrigue and competition. I quite like the idea that it’s because they’re based on things that make up our fundamental being and compose our base level of existence. It’s neat and stacks well, but who knows? I could be wrong. I guess you’ll have to use your words—your unflinching armaments of direct communication shuttled through your fingers to your keyboard to my idiot eyes and brain—to tell me just how wrong I am.