Rodney's Funscreen

Rodney's Funscreen is one of those programs about which we say today “what on earth was that thing?” The year is 1992, DOS, and it is something that sprawls somewhere between a screensaver and a game with no clear identity. The name promises fun; the reality is considerably more modest.

It is essentially a screen full of colorful elements and animations that you control by clicking or pressing keys. There is no distinct goal, no game in the classic sense — you mostly just play around with whatever happens on your monitor. The little character or the elements react to your input, nothing more. For kids of the early nineties it may have been interesting; today it looks as if you were bored and throwing firecrackers into a digital bush.

The graphics are typically DOS — the colors are there, the animations move, the sound crackles out of the speaker. Nothing elegant, nothing advanced, simply primitive, the way things were done back then. The controls are simple to the point of triviality. You click, something happens. You click somewhere else, something else happens. You can't play it in the traditional sense — it is more of an interactive coloring book.

Rodney's Funscreen is a memento of an era when people thought everything on a computer had to be fun simply because it moved and beeped. Today it feels like a lost moment spent clicking on something that didn't interest you. It deserves a tip of the hat for its honesty — at least it doesn't pretend to be something it isn't.

When I play it in the browser today just for the memory, I see what it was — a piece of DOS culture made by creators without a big budget or a clear vision, but with the conviction that their creativity was enough. It was neither a game nor a screensaver. It was simply... a thing that existed.