Encarta Mindmaze - PC

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Was Dante in fact playing Encarta Mindmaze and just being overly poetic?

This exploratory quiz game is a phenomena rarely encountered by the post-Wikipedia generation, only in the days when Encarta came lumped with your old 90's PC, in a desperate bid for some entertainment value, did many bored and unsuspecting PC users inadvertently stumble upon this initially fun but eventually witheringly tedious program. Lumber all the way to 20,000 points and you were amply rewarded with this text box (I thought I'd post this to save you the monumental task):

You enter a throne room filled with people. The king and queen are in their thrones. The other castle denizens stand in groups of three and four, talking, drinking and laughing. When the king notices you, he clears his throat, silencing the room. "Your attention, good friends! Our rescuer is here! Strange one from another time, we must thank you for breaking the curse and saving our castle. We know that you are anxious to return home, and the sorceress is prepared to perform the necessary magic, but we hope that you will honor us by first attending a banquet to be held in your honor this evening. Rather soon, actually: many of us are very hungry!

You enjoy the fine banquet that follows and are prepared to be sent back home by the sorceress. However, on the way to her chambers, the court alchemist stops you in the hall. "I'm so glad I found you, he says. The king did not reward you sufficiently, in my opinion, and I intend to make up for his oversight. I have nearly perfected the formula for changing lead into gold, and when I am finished, I will give you bags of it to take home with you! Just stay around a few more days... A week at most... No more than a month, definitely... A year at the absolute most, and I'm certain I'll have it..." He wanders off, lost in thought, and you hurry to the sorceress to be sent home at last.

Wikipedia Article
Some kids who have yet to play a "real" computer game!

Basically you navigate through a medieval maze (a dungeon crawl, if you will), enter strangely decorated rooms and answer general knowledge questions at varying degrees of difficulty. It doesn't sound like much but it had some strange sort of Borgian / Poe-esque atmosphere that could hold you in its thrall for hours. I believe it originally surfaced in Encarta 95 and has become less and less well known since becoming a hidden feature (ctrl-z) on later versions. It doesn't exist as a separate download to my knowledge; so if you fancy reliving those rainy days, I suggest picking up a copy of Encarta 95 for pennies, going through the usual channels or blowing the dust from that musty old software bundle...Microsoft Golf anyone?!