Math Blaster!

You shoot at red squares with numbers and try to convince yourself you're practicing math. But in reality, you're just running around with a keyboard and shooting everything that moves. Math Blaster from 1986 is a product of the educational kitchen of personal computing — half game, half worksheet with animation.

You move around a pixelated planet, collect little monsters representing math problems, and eliminate them using the correct answer. When it asks you what 3 + 5 is, you select from the options using a cursor. Hitting the right number is followed by an explosion and a few points. The sci-fi setting with retro space design has ambitions for fun, but you can feel that it's really just questions in different packaging.

The gameplay is straightforward: run, shoot, calculate. The mouse and keyboard controls work functionally, nothing more. The game doesn't play on adrenaline though, more on pressure. Make a mistake on the problem and more monsters spawn. That's the only dramatic element — the fear of failing at simple math. For a nineteen-year-old kid in nineties games, it was probably motivating. Today it looks more like gym class equipment wrapped in technology.

Math Blaster was part of a wave of educational games that appeared in American schools and computer classrooms. It didn't pretend that fun equals learning — it was just designers who believed that colorful pixels and sounds would turn long division into a fun game. They were partly wrong.

You can play it today in your browser without wasting time. If you're curious about how learning worked in the eighties and what computer education safety teams thought, this is how you look at the beginning. But because you expect fun from a game, not lists of problems, you'll quit at the first difficulty spike when you realize you're actually bored.