12/8/2022 0 Comments Microsoft encarta gameMy parents used Radio Rentals (another relic of a bygone era) to get a PC for a monthly fee. PCs were, and largely still are, expensive. This is really how most kids used Encarta, even if it was very hard. Sadly the actual hand-written and drawn presentation has long been pulped, but it included such arguments as "we'll get better grades," "you'll save time by not taking us to the library," "save money on books," and "the school computers are always busy." I remember laying these paper sheets out on my parents' bed, then calling them up to listen to our presentation. I (and it should be said, my brother) wanted a PC to play games on, so work began on a sales pitch. FOMO definitely existed in the 90s, although usually it was due to a cousin having something you wanted, like a SNES.Įncarta, a PC-based encyclopedia that I'd used at school, would, in all fairness to 12-year-old me, be very useful, but I was absolutely using my education as a Trojan horse. My friend at the time had a Roger Rabbit game, which looking back was ultra naff, but it was an example of something I couldn't play. Unlike games consoles, which were not cheap but also not completely out of reach with prolonged savings and staying a few years behind the release schedule, a PC for games felt like an impossible dream. I'd seen Doom, Doom 2, Wing Commander, Heretic, System Shock, Magic Carpet, Syndicate and more, and desperately wanted to play them. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. I wasn't interested in those as they didn't fit into my grand plan. Some families had printed encyclopedias on a big bookshelf. If you needed to do research for something, such as science homework, you'd need to read a book or hope a parent knew everything there is to know about electromagnets. If you didn't exist in the mid-90s or were too young to function as a person, this was an era before the internet - something that would only become mainstream in the home in the late 90s/early 2000s. This was THE thing kids wanted in the mid-90s. This was how I'd convince my parents to get a PC that I could play games on. I latched onto this fact in a big way back when I was 12 years old. There was no way the average kid was getting hold of an Encarta CD, but then something magical happened: it was bundled with a lot of new PCs. It's part of a devious scheme that made me who I am today. Encarta for me is more than an impressive archive of information. My son being taught how to research a subject (penguins, if you must know) thrust this iconic bit of the 90s back into my thoughts, no doubt like how a jewel thief might rekindle past heists when teaching their children how to make a plan. If you are a fortunate child of the mid-90s you'll have experience with Encarta, the interactive CD-based encyclopedia from Microsoft. I can't have been the only child that made a presentation for their parents in order to sell the value of a home PC in the mid-90s.
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