Tuesday 23 December 2008

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?!

19 comments:

  1. i must be a hardcore geek, but i loved! this game back then. almost makes me wish i had a pc so i can dust off my old encarta '99 cd

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  2. This game was incredible. I had no idea what half the questions meant but memorized their answers anyway just to progress. did anyone ever beat it?

    Pity Encarta is being canceled, I wish someone would emulate this game...

    http://ow.ly/1JaR

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  3. I loved this game! I forgot all about it until I heard Encarta was being canceled, and then floods of my childhood memories of reading Encarta for fun and playing this game came back to me.

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  4. I will not miss Encarta, but Mind Maze was incredible. My sister and I would spend hours a day playing the game when we were young. I don't think we ever beat it, but then again we were only 8 and 10 years old at the time. This makes me want to dig out that old Encarta 95......

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  5. encarta told me things about the world that my 8year old mind could not comprehend, but i loved it. MindMaze had such cool music, remember?

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  6. omg i played mindmaze the way the rest of the kids in my class played mario! i want an emulation of this game soooo bad!!!

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  7. Thank you for posting this, I absolutely loved this game! You brought me back :)

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  8. I spent many nights pawning this game off as educational. Awesome!

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  9. I was actually looking for a game similar to Mindmaze that involved a few more RPG elements. It is in of itself a great game. The two shots then out rule really adds to the tension.

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  10. Where can I find Mind Maze? Does anyone know?

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  11. oh man. i was cleaning my house a week ago and i was so thrilled that i found my encarta cd again. i loved playing this game as a kid but never could answer all the questions... D:

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  12. where can we find it online? I miss it

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  13. this game defines much of my childhood. please tell me there is a way i can play mindmaze on my mac.

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  14. i want to play this game on my pc...from where do i download it?

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  15. For the nostalgic among you I recreated Mindmaze using questions generated on-the-fly from Wikipedia pages. I tried to stay true to the classic nature of the game. You can play it in the browser (http://wikimaze.me) or find it in the Apple Store. Have fun!

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  16. The link from Benjamin would be absolutely awesome; if it worked. Upon moving in any direction, I simply receive a message stating that the application is all out of questions. It tells me to make sure I'm connected to the internet. How did I get to the page if I wasn't connected? Arg.

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  17. Well, it actually started working. Unfortunately the questions are just randomized from Wikipedia. It doesn't offer the cerebral quality provided in the original game. It amounts to the same as any other trivia game, but without the ability to specify a range of question types. I will continue to scour the closet for my Encarta 96.

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  18. Found my Encarta 98 disk but it won't run on Windows XP. Any idea if there is a way to make it work on a newer machine?!

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  19. I'm in the same boat as Bern. Wondering what's the latest installment of Encarta that Windows 10 can handle?

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