Peter Pan - A Story Painting Adventure

Year 1993, Novotrade — the same folks who brought us Ecco the Dolphin. And here they decided to make an educational adventure for kids based on Peter Pan. The result is exactly as strange as it sounds.

Peter Pan: A Story Painting Adventure isn't an adventure in the classic sense. It's more of an interactive storybook with game elements, aimed at the youngest players. The story draws from James Matthew Barrie's classic source material — Peter Pan, Wendy, Captain Hook, Neverland. Nothing surprising, nothing new. This was licensed children's software that was pretty standard retail fare back in the day, sitting on shelves alongside cereal boxes and juice boxes.

Gameplay revolves around simple puzzles and the "story painting" concept — kids complete drawings in the story or influence the plot by clicking. Mouse controls, no complicated interface. For the standards of that era, it was an accessible format that gave parents the feeling their kids were at least thinking a little bit at the computer. Whether it actually worked as an educational tool, I'll leave that to the pedagogues.

What remains is the period charm of early CD-ROM children's software — colorful, flat graphics with that specific '90s flavor. It's not Myst, but it doesn't pretend to be. It's aged the way most edutainment does — quickly and mercilessly. Today it looks like a relic from a world where parents paid fifty bucks for software their kid forgot about by afternoon. The sounds are exactly what you'd expect from Sound Blaster and a budget-appropriate ambition level.

Today, practically only a nostalgic who actually remembers this specific title from childhood, or a DOS-era curiosities collector, will play it in a browser. As a gaming experience, it's thin. As a time capsule capturing how the industry imagined children's software in 1993, it has its value. Novotrade was doing interesting work across various fronts back then — but the jump from Ecco to this is quite a shadow leap, and not the Peter Pan kind.