so if i burn down my house do i get to be on a home repair tv show
Sometimes, to make money, you gotta destroy a multimillion-dollar software market, rob children of engaging methods of learning, set the industry back by twenty years, and get one of the only female Fortune 500 CEOs fired. Let's take a look at edutainment, the buzzword of the 90s! Special appearance by Sebulba, everyone's favorite Star Wars character!
Education is a fascinating subject, isn't it? My mother's a teacher, so I spent a lot of time in classrooms growing up. On top of a general appreciation for the task of getting through to children and helping them reach their potential (thanks mom), I also happened to spend a lot of time playing old edutainment games. These things were so often terrible, poorly-disguised pop quizzes, but as a bored kid, they were something to do. This is a story I've wanted to take on for a bit.
This story has a lot of details that were interesting to juggle. Striking a balance between contextualizing the whole industry and not getting bogged down in irrelevant information was a challenge, and I ended up sticking to a few major characters to follow through the story - MECC, TLC, SoftKey, and (to a minor extent) Broderbund. That felt like a good way to give the video a solid core that it can flow through.
This video was supposed to be out in April. It took me forever to sift through my sources and map out my story, and then longer to sit down and write the thing. And along the way it turned into my longest video, with the densest editing and the most visual gags, and just a lot of work in general. I even wrote two new music tracks for it! I'm very happy with how it turned out, but it did take three months...