The undersea theme and folklorish elements hit a sweet spot with kids like me who were still riding high off The Little Mermaid and FernGully (which was not considered a mega hit at the time either, and spawned a pseudo-game of its own), but it wasn’t quite enough for Sierra, at least not compared to its “normal” game sales. But wherever we were, wherever we could solve something like that, we tried.” “We were on this weird cusp of bizarre imagination and scientific verifiability that doesn’t really kind of work. “ said, ‘Well they can only ingest one object at a time.’ And I go, ‘Perfect, so if I got it to swallow something else, it would have to spit the thing out.’ She goes, ‘Oh, yes, that’s what would happen,’” Haine says. NOAA even connected Haine with a scientist to verify the eating habits of a certain anemone for a puzzle. The Sierra team reached out to the Marine Mammal Center and NOAA, learning about the vets who saved and rehabilitated wild animals. It told the story of Adam Greene, the son of an ecologist who goes on an underwater adventure to save the kingdom of Eluria from devastating pollution.
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The Search for Cetus was a standard Sierra adventure, complete with talking animals, a recycling mechanic, and a marine conservation theme that primed a generation for 1993’s Free Willy mania. “But he loved it and then we were designers, which elevated us out of what we were in the writers’ group and put us in Sierra’s most coveted slot, which is designing a Sierra game.” “We didn’t really expect to get greenlit,” she says.
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“We were also asked every week to do a series of pitch documents and occasionally, would decide to greenlight something.” EcoQuest was born when Haine and co-designer Jane Jensen landed on the idea of a talking dolphin. “Ken wanted to expand beyond their wheelhouse, which was the graphical 2D, at the time, adventure,” she says. Haine was part of Sierra’s Writer’s Lab, an in-house team that did everything from dialogue to puzzle design. And even though Sierra had released the formative point-and-click Mixed-Up Mother Goose in 1987, nobody really knew what good edutainment was supposed to look like. Kids didn’t really have story-driven games. Games like Mavis Beacon and Reader Rabbit - the former taught typing, and the latter language and basic math - were the most successful examples that became childhood staples, but this is where edutainment stopped evolving. “But I’m a storyteller, so of course that’s the part I liked the best.”Īt the time, edutainment was defined by what Haine describes as “kill and drill” games that taught children practical skills through repetitive exercises. “We were starting to come up with devices that maybe should have been the product rather than being harnessed to the story,” she says. Sure, you should be doing homework, but Carmen Sandiego is on the loose!Īccording to Rainforest’s director/designer Gano Haine, the Ecorder was an attempt to cram information into an edutainment game that was tethered to the limitations of Sierra’s design methodology, as the team had a specific way of planning room diagrams before sprinkling in puzzles and working on art. With every scrap of information about pollution and face paint, I swelled with confidence that I was learning something special about the world.Ĭomputer Lab Week is our ode to the classic “school” games, like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers, that kept us from being productive. It was easy to fall in love with the Ecorder as a tool of empowerment to understand this strange new environment - the Peruvian rainforest - that I’d never seen. If I wanted to dig into a specific topic, like rainforest canopies or native tribes in the Amazon, I had one option: the library. The corny idea of an “information superhighway” was still growing - at the time, it was more like a bunch of private neighborhood roads. As a 9-year-old, it was nothing short of magic.īack then, there was no social media, or internet as we know it today. All I knew was that with the Ecorder, I could instantly identify exotic plants, animals, and cultural artifacts.
I was too young for Star Trek, so the obvious tricorder parallels eluded me. It was the sequel to EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus, a Sierra On-Line point-and-click adventure, and my first brush with the idea of global, big-picture environmentalism.
In 1993, I got my first taste of Wikipedia-style learning - not from Encarta, the multimedia encyclopedia that defined a generation, but through the Ecorder, a fictional device in Lost Secret of the Rainforest.
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