Treasure Mountain!

A mountain track full of letters and numbers. Treasure Mountain is such a puzzle in a graphical guise – an educational game that at the beginning of the nineties looked like adventure, but in reality it stops you every five minutes to ask you a math or English question.

The game principle is simple. You go up the mountains, collect treasures and solve riddles. But not linearly – the game offers you branching paths and at each intersection you have to answer correctly, or you fall back down. The focus is purely educational, no shooting or jumping over monsters. It's about calculating the example correctly or completing the word.

What's left of it today? The graphics in Tandy mode look naive, the colors are gaudy and the character slides across the screen like a paper figure. The pace is annoying – wait for animations, wait for response, wait for the next question. And that's what hurts the most today. Calculating was tedious from the start, but here you also have the feeling that the game is still thinking about what to give you next.

Still — when a child in the eighties or nineties was bored for a while, these educational titles were the only thing that played at home. And sometimes they had just the right amount of fun hook to keep you from going crazy while learning. Treasure Mountain tried, took the trouble with atmosphere and structure.

Today? When you want to absorb the atmosphere of old educational software without tears of frustration, click on it. It's not a game to play, it's an artifact. But that's exactly why you see on it how educational software tried to be interesting.