How EcoQuest brought Wikipedia into my childhood in 1993
In 1993, I got my first taste of Wikipedia-style learning — not from Encarta, the multimedia encyclopedia that defined a generation, but through the Ecorder, a fictional device in Lost Secret of the Rainforest. It was the sequel to EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus, a Sierra On-Line point-and-click adventure, and my first brush with the idea of global, big-picture environmentalism. I was too young for Star Trek, so the obvious tricorder parallels eluded me. All I knew was that with the Ecorder, I could instantly identify exotic plants, animals, and cultural artifacts. As a 9-year-old, it was nothing short of magic.
Back then, there was no social media, or internet as we know it today. The corny idea of an “information superhighway” was still growing — at the time, it was more like a bunch of private neighborhood roads. If I wanted to dig into a specific topic, like rainforest canopies or native tribes in the Amazon, I had one option: the library. It was easy to fall in love with the Ecorder as a tool of empowerment to understand this strange new environment — the Peruvian rainforest — that I’d never seen. With every scrap of information about pollution and face paint, I swelled with confidence that I was learning something special about the world.
Computer Lab Week is our ode to the classic “school” games, like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers, that kept us from being productive. Sure, you should be doing homework, but Carmen Sandiego is on the loose!
According to Rainforest’s director/designer Gano Haine, the Ecorder was an attempt to cram information into an edutainment game that was tethered to the limitations of Sierra’s design methodology, as the team had a specific way of planning room diagrams before sprinkling in
Read more on polygon.com
