Welcome back to our new miniseries within the Friday Know-It-All that we’re calling “Return to the Computer Lab.” This is a semi-regular series à la TonySPN in which our editorial staff explore the beloved computer games of our childhoods. (Are you surprised to learn many of us spent a lot of time on the computer?) Editor Ruby is back to talk math games.

You wouldn’t know it based on my struggles with basic arithmetic, but I spent a lot of my childhood pretty into math. (Arithmetic and higher level math are different skills!!! Just 'cause I can’t add 43 and 72 in my head doesn’t mean I can’t understand a derivative!) I’m here to talk about one widely shared math game touchstone, one that I’ve never heard anyone else talk about, and one that’s so niche it is a mystery.

First up: “Zoombinis.” You knew we had to do it! “Logical Journey of the Zoombinis” was a groundbreaking logic education game. No numbers, all math. The Zoombinis were enslaved and are fleeing from their homeland, which was taken over by the Bloats (kind of a grim framework for a children’s game, but you gotta learn about colonialism sometime). You had to guide them through 12 puzzles in groups of three on their way to their new home in Zoombiniville. More details on how the game is played here, and all the levels here. Presuming I’m speaking to a “Zoombinis” knowledgeable audience, here’s what I have to say:

I feel like when people talk about “Zoombinis,” the focus is on the pizza level, which is very fun and good, but I’d like to show some attention to Mudball Wall, where a mechanical wall throws mud at a screen in certain color patterns, which I found very sensorially pleasing. In negative news, the Mirror Machine stressed me the heck out.
The game would let you make two identical Zoombinis, so I would always make my Zoombinis nearly identical (i.e. all the same hair and feet, with two nose colors and two of each eyes). This made the game, which is all about patterns, much easier! Whenever I see anyone else’s screenshots from the game, their Zoombinis are all super different from each other, which seems like hard mode.
If you play the game for too long in one day, it tells you, “You’ve rescued enough Zoombinis for one day. Go outside!” The first time this happened to me, I was so stunned that the computer could know how long I’d been playing a game, and furthermore that it would tell me to stop. In retrospect, more computers should tell you to touch grass.

“Zoombinis” was remade by TERC in 2016. I was delighted to redownload it, but I quickly discovered that 1) it took up an unbelievable amount of space on my computer and 2) my attention span has shrunk dramatically since I was a child. I have no tolerance for the pauses between moves or loading screens – which used to be necessary and actually doing something, and now are, I believe, a skeuomorph. I can’t swing it! The individual games are still pretty fun.

Onto my more niche math game: y’all ever played “Math Shop Deluxe”? I found a downloadable version, but I don’t seem to be able to extract it. You might have better luck. “Math Shop Deluxe” shows a secret world down a hidden alley where all the stores require you to do math problems. My strongest memories of it are the hardware store, where you have to measure all kinds of things (bubble gum, rope, normal hardware store stuff). There’s a cookie store where you learn fractions and a beauty parlor where you have to calculate price per ounce to figure out the best deal on different sizes of shampoo – a widely applicable skill. I remember there being something super cool in the arcade at the end of the alley, but I can’t remember what it was, and it kind of feels in my brain like when you dream a new room in your house.

And finally, a mystery. If you can figure this one out, I need you to email me. Here’s what I remember: you as the player managed a band who were on a tour across the country. You had to keep solving their problems using math — I most strongly remember putting together an order at a diner on a budget, but I think sometimes you had to do something with the van being broken by the side of the road? At gigs, you had two non-math games that would come up: either the drummer was sick and you had to play a proto “Guitar Hero” game to hit the snare and the floor tom with the space and command keys, or you just did a little race around the city to pick up tokens and avoid… something? It was kind of “Pac-Man” adjacent. I am truly on the verge of setting up a Reddit account just to post in r/tipofmyjoystick about it. I have to imagine the music was quite bad, but I’d like to hear it again.

That’s all for this week’s Return to the Computer Lab and that’s all there is to know, or vaguely remember, this week.