CHEVTECH: Chevy Disk Drive

When you realize today that someone programmed this thing in the eighties as an educational game about disks and files, you feel a mix of amazement and pity. CHEVTECH: Chevy Disk Drive is definitely the only game that explains the inner workings of a hard disk through the story of a blue car trying to find its way home. Nothing more than that. Nothing else was needed either.

It's educational software from 1987, when computers were being introduced into schools and someone figured that if learning how a computer organizes data would be cool, then everyone would play it. Chevy is your guide through the world of files, directories, and disk structure. You move through space, collect the "right" things, and learn where the computer puts them. Fun? That depends on whether you're really interested in why a disk has a hierarchy.

It plays like a very primitive adventure with icons and minimal interaction tools. Overhead perspective, simple controls, graphics that would remind you of working in a system environment: a black transparent disk with labels. Not so much a game as an interactive textbook with a little car character. Playing it feels as dull as a teacher trying to spice up a lesson. Those five minutes you spent with it, you learned more about disks than from a paper manual, but you were also so bored you wished it would end.

It survives primarily as a curious record of how education and computers met in the nineties. It's not poorly made — it's just not a game. The goal wasn't to entertain, the goal was to explain. For its time, it was honest, now it just stands in a museum of oddities.

Today you play it only to experience the story of what computer education looked like when 3.5-inch floppies were still serious business. For a personal computer historian: interesting. For anyone else: too grey an educational care that comforts neither with education nor entertainment.