Moses Matchup

The nineties were a weird time. Sandwiched between Doom and Warcraft II in shareware archives lurked games nobody expected and few were looking for. Moses Matchup from 1993 is exactly that kind of gem — an educational puzzle game with a biblical theme, apparently written solo by Dan Sharpe, seemingly with missionary zeal.

The game belongs to a category that was called edutainment back then — educational entertainment for kids, most often with religious themes. The premise is clear from the title itself: Moses, his story from the burning bush through the ten plagues of Egypt to the Ten Commandments. The target audience is clearly children from devout families, whose parents wanted to give them something better than mowing down demons with a shotgun.

It's a matching game — matchup, meaning connecting pictures or concepts. The mechanics are simple, controls are minimal, graphics match a 1993 home project. No grand ambitions, no surprises. The game itself offers an INST button in the menu with instructions that also serve as an explanation of the story — so if you don't know Moses, the game will first teach you and then test you. An elegant solution by shareware standards for a one-person title.

What hasn't aged well? Pretty much everything technical. The graphics were modest even back then, today they look like a Paint exercise. The gameplay is so straightforward that a kid will exhaust it in an afternoon. The "edutainment" genre in general didn't really survive — it turned out that kids learn either through a game that truly entertains them, or through boredom at school, and this middle ground usually leads nowhere. Moses Matchup is no exception. Still, it has value as a period artifact: it shows what software looked like when it was made outside commercial studios, on no budget, but with a clear purpose.

Today it'll mainly be played by collectors of curiosities and people who want to see what all was spinning in shareware catalogs back then. As a gaming experience, it's more of a historical document than a challenge. You'll get through it in your browser in ten minutes, but those ten minutes will at least entertain you with how earnestly and plainly it was made. And that's worth something.