Aladino

When I was a boy, “it doesn't work without a chain,” one of the demoscene lads used to say in the computer room back then. Aladino was exactly that kind of software — something between an educational passport and a game that was made because such things were being made, but nobody really knew why.

It is an educational adventure from 1994 in which somebody took the familiar fairy tale about Aladdin's lamp and wrapped it in a DOS envelope. A run through Asian bazaars, collecting items, solving puzzles — a combination of point-and-click mechanics with elements of a puzzle adventure. The goal is the expected one: find the magic lamp, make your wish, get out. Everything is meant to be educational, which means frequent texts, a voice recording with a reading mode and lots of verifiable facts about life in the Orient.

Technically it works, but without frills. The graphics are static, and rather than carrying you into the story, they hold you back. The colors are flat tones, almost no animation — you click, you wait, the text asks you something, and you look around the room for the answer. The sound has the gravity of a textbook, not of an entertainment game. The controls are comfortable for 1994, a mouse with icons — you know it from other edutainment titles of the time.

Aladino was part of the wave of educational games that thought they could be entertainment and learning at the same time, and almost always failed on both fronts. Today you look at it differently again — it is an artifact of the time when computers in schools meant something special. The original authorship is not entirely clear, which in itself says quite a lot.

If you are interested in what the educational offering for home computers looked like over the course of the nineties, or if you want to compare how educational elements presented themselves before designers learned to hide them in real entertainment, you can launch it in DOSBox. Do not expect relaxation, you will just understand more precisely why such attempts usually do not succeed.