
The Fleens were not friendly to the Zoombinis. The Zoombinis game map pays homage to The Lord of the Rings. We just thought of it as entertaining." 5. We absolutely hated that title," Hancock told Input. In fact, when Brøderbund executives insisted that the game be called The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, the creators were unimpressed. Zoombinis wasn’t designed to be educational.ĭespite the fact that The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis featured a variety of puzzles and had grown out of a data-visualization project, the creators didn’t see their game as a supplement to classroom learning. After passing on "Snood," a product director threw out the idea of " Zoombinis," and the name just felt right. Once they decided to push the project forward, however, it was clear that the duo needed a name that wasn’t already taken. What to call the little blue creatures Osterweil had designed to represent data? Hancock initially dubbed them " Snoids" after a comic book character written by cartoonist Robert Crumb. Zoombinis were originally called "snoids." The executive made an offer: If Handcock and Osterweil could focus their game around the characters that had captured her daughter’s attention, she was in. She was immediately taken with the characters, and her interest in turn caught the eye of her mother. The daughter of an executive Brøderbund happened to be in the office at the time and ended up playing around with the prototype. When Hancock shopped potential video game companies to bring the game to market, it was the little blue blobs that stole the show.
#Get zoombinis game trial#
Making the perfect pizza required a bit of trial and error. A game company exec’s daughter proved Zoombinis’s appeal. But when Osterweil, who’d been hired to design computer graphics at TERC, got involved, the project shifted away from plots and Venn diagrams and started to resemble something Zoombinis fans might recognize. Hancock had been developing a tool called Tabletop Jr., which was designed to help kids work with data. In the mid-1990s, Chris Hancock and Scot Osterweil were both employees at Technical Education Research Centers ( TERC), a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. The Zoombinis co-creators met while working at an educational nonprofit. Here are 11 facts you might not know about the beloved Logical Journey of the Zoombinis game. Saving the Zoombinis was a rite of passage for a lot of ‘90s kids.
#Get zoombinis game series#
What’s small, blue, and needs to be rescued via a series of puzzle games? Zoombinis, of course! These blobs of goodwill graced the screens of many a ‘90s PC, inviting kids to use logic and experimentation as they led a troupe of exploited island workers through a Deep, Dark Forest and the Mountains of Despair en route to Zoombiniville.
