Chadwick and the Sneaky Egg Thief

Sometime in the mid-nineties, there was an entire ecosystem of small publishers releasing CD-ROMs for kids — things nobody today would call games, but back then they sold in cardboard boxes next to the cash register at the electronics store. Chadwick and the Sneaky Egg Thief from Knowware in 1994 is exactly that kind of software.

It's an interactive coloring book. No story arc, no game loops in the true sense — just an animated book with a character named Chadwick, with the aforementioned egg thief spinning around. The goal is simple: you click, pick colors, paint. Knowware was among the smaller players in the educational software market, filling the gap between actual games and learning programs for the youngest users.

The controls are point-and-click as simple as it gets — color palette, mouse, pictures waiting to be painted. Nothing that would be hard to explain to a kid. The animations are basic, exactly as decent as a DOS machine in 1994 with the modest hardware that the vast majority of families owned back then could manage. The sound probably comes from basic MIDI or the PC speaker — technically undemanding, functionally adequate.

Today it doesn't age well as a gaming experience — it didn't age well back then either. Coloring books are coloring books. What has changed is the context: back then, having anything interactive on screen for a five-year-old was an event. Today the same kid has applications with physics and voice control on a tablet. Chadwick next to that looks like a steam locomotive — admirably old, but unsuitable for everyday commuting.

Who does this suit today? Really nobody as entertainment — but as a nostalgic artifact from the early era of children's PC software, it's an interesting document of the age. If you had a 486 at home back then, you might enjoy seeing what "multimedia software for the whole family" looked like before the real CD-ROM boom hit. Firing it up in a browser via DOSBox emulation takes longer than playing through the whole program — but that's almost the rule with software this niche.