The long, strange journey of 'Zoombinis'

Greg Toppo | USATODAY

Welcome back to Pizza Pass.

If you grew up in the mid-1990s or early 2000s, you probably encountered that hallowed imaginary place at a friend's house after school while playing the cult classic computer game Logical Journey of the Zoombinis.

The beloved CD-ROM game appeared in 1996 and stuck around for a decade. Then it disappeared, its code languishing as a series of corporate owners neglected it and its former users discovered the charms and distractions of the World Wide Web.

Well, the strange little logic game is back. The reboot appears Aug. 6 on the Android and Apple app stores, with plans to release it soon for PC and Mac users.

If it's possible to have nostalgic feelings for a piece of software, Zoombinis is the one to love. Launched by the software firm Broderbund in 1996, the game appeared at a key time: just as computers were showing up in American homes, but before they became ubiquitous.

At the time, PCs were expensive. Only curious hobbyists were willing to invest $1,000 or more in the big, bulky units, said Scot Osterweil, one of Zoombinis' original co-developers. If you had a PC, you weren't yet using it to play all your CDs, pay your bills and telecommute. "You just thought, 'There are interesting things I can do with this,'" he said. "It wasn't yet commodified."

Games of the era, including Zoombinis, reflected that. They allowed users to indulge their curiosity without the nagging requirement that they make their kids more competitive in school.

"The goal was never to be curricular," Osterweil said. "It was never to say, 'These are things kids must learn and we know we must teach them in this sequence.' We really were thinking about it as an entertainment game."

Which is all very interesting when you consider that Zoombinis was actually an adaptation of Tabletop, a data visualization tool developed in the early 1990s by Chris Hancock, one of Osterweil's colleagues at the Cambridge, Mass.-based non-profit Technical Education Research Centers (TERC). Hancock had also developed Tabletop Jr., a children's version, and soon he and Osterweil began playing with the idea of creating a database tool built around bits of data that kids could easily digest and manipulate, such as pizza toppings and facial and body features. They created a race of creatures called Snoids, with hundreds of possible variations.

"It worked well," Osterweil said. "Kids loved playing with them. It turned out to be a really interesting space to think about multiple variables and independent variables."

In 1993, Hancock took the little digital toy to Broderbund, an educational software company near San Francisco that had already scored a hit with Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? They liked it but weren't sure what to do with it.

Then, a few weeks later, during a "family day" at Broderbund, a product manager's 15-year-old daughter happened upon the Snoids on a computer desktop. She and a friend spent hours playing with it. The mother came back to Osterweil and Hancock and asked: Can you make a game out of this?

What emerged was a candy-colored CD-ROM adventure title that invited players to lead a beleaguered tribe of blue eggplant-shaped creatures out of slavery and into a new land. But first they had to get past oppressive and picky overlords who wanted their pizza served just-so and their Zoombinis sorted by hair style, eye shape and nose color, among other arbitrary indicators.

"We were probably plumbing our own self-consciousness, but over time we realized that the Zoombinis were kids," Osterweil said. "They were persistent. Our joke was that they were knee-high to everything they met. The world was full of bigger creatures. And if you think about it, rules in a kid's world are arbitrary. The kids shouldn't have to sort themselves by feature — they don't believe in that. But the world is full of these big people who tell them to sort."

In reality, Zoombinis took players through the step-by-step process of learning how to create and use a database. It was also tremendous fun.

During the decade or so in which it was widely available, Zoombinis developed a cult following, mostly outside the classroom. Then a larger outfit named The Learning Company (TLC) swallowed up Broderbund. The resulting company became part of a bigger acquisition by toy giant Mattel Inc. At $3.6 billion, the deal was so huge and ill-conceived that, to this day, business students read about it as case study of what not to do. To those who had been pioneers of the emerging learning software field, the deal also typified a kind of profit-driven model that all but ruined their dreams of using computers to help kids enjoy learning.

"I sold all my stock for a dollar a share," TLC founder Ann McCormick said a few years later. "When it went to sixty-five, I lost thirty million dollars making that decision. And I don't regret it … they made it impossible to transform education alongside making huge profits by doling the same little programs over and over."

Eventually, McCormick and others watched as the "edutainment" industry crumbled because it couldn't deliver on the promise of creating software that was both profitable and effective. After the Mattel deal soured, TLC's assets ended up in the hands of a private equity firm, then at an Irish publisher named Riverdeep Interactive Learning. In 2006, Riverdeep bought the educational publishing house Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Zoombinis languished as its code, built for early PCs and Macintosh computers, proved unplayable on newer models.

"It was becoming an unmaintained piece of software," said Jodi Asbell-Clarke, an astrophysicist who directs TERC's Educational Gaming Environments group. "If you kept your computer, it could still run. But once you got your new computer, there was no way to run it."

Pizza Pass could have passed away there, but a sharp-eyed TERC lawyer named Glen Secor found the original Broderbund contract and realized that the non-profit retained the rights to Zoombinis and could get them back if the publisher wasn't actively selling the game. So he asked Harcourt to hand over the game. When Harcourt officials checked on sales, they realized that Zoombinis and its two sequels had sold over a million copies.

But the chain of corporate owners meant that Zoombinis "kept passing from successor company to successor company, and in a way it didn't really have a home," said TERC's David Libby. "People knew it was a good piece of software. They knew people liked it, but it was never anywhere long enough to fit into a strategic plan."

After Harcourt in 2011 unsuccessfully rebooted Carmen Sandiego on Facebook, Secor and Libby pursued the matter more aggressively. "Eventually we kind of poked them and said, 'Listen, you're not really selling it.'" To their credit, Harcourt finally agreed and handed over the rights.

After a furious bidding war among five developers, TERC settled on the Boston educational media studio FableVision. In the bargain, TERC also got the services of the non-profit Learning Games Network, as well as Hancock and Osterweil, the game's original co-creators, who were part of FableVision's bid.

Libby, who became the project's executive producer, soon got a gift in the mail from Harcourt: a hard drive holding 20 gigabytes of data. On the hard drive were assets for all three Zoombinis games: art, sound and music. The game, it turned out, was built using a proprietary game engine particular to Broderbund. All FableVision had to do was take it all apart, create all new art and gameplay, and put it all back together again. In several cases, FableVision's Gary Goldberger said, designers checking on details simply fired up an old Macintosh G4 and played a rare copy of the original.

A February 2015 Kickstarter campaign aimed at raising $50,000 to fund the desktop versions alerted "a very hardcore fan base" to the reboot, said Libby. It raised $101,716, some of which will go toward upgrading the game's final level. In it, all of the Zoombinis get to Zoombiniville, but in the existing version, players get perfunctory fireworks and a screen that says, "You win."

"For all that hard work, it's a little anticlimactic," said Libby of the final scene.

They also created a Facebook page and regularly use it to check in with fans. In an early design meeting, the question arose: Should they rename the characters? Their current names are randomly generated jumbles of letters. Libby opened his laptop and posed the question to the group. Within minutes, the answer was clear: No. One writer said she had a character and its name tattooed on her right hip.

TERC has also been beating the bushes for grant funding to study how much "computational thinking" kids do while playing Zoombinis, both at home and in the classroom, and whether teachers can extend the lessons outside the game. The National Science Foundation has already funded this research to the tune of nearly $2 million.

Fans are excited.

“I’m definitely going to play through it a bunch,” said Wagner Koop, 21, a student at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich. “It’s just kind of re-experiencing something that I really enjoyed as a kid. I’m pretty excited to see how this turns out.”

Osterweil, now creative director of MIT's Education Arcade, has since developed several important games, but said, "I will always love Zoombinis. The other night I was up til 1 o'clock playing it. I got hooked on it again."

The new Zoombinis app is available on Apple's App Store and on Google Play.