DesignWare’s best-seller Spellicopter was released in 1983 and went gold and platinum, selling zillions of copies. It was on the SKU best-sellers list month after month. (Below the fold—a video of Spellicopter being played!)
Other companies involved in edutainment software in those days included The Learning Company (Rocky’s boots), Davidson, and Spinnaker Software. Many other companies entered the market during the decade. There were also some more “serious education” contenders including Eduware (Algebra series), and Blue Chip Software (stock market games), which we incorporated into DesignWare under Britannica Software in 1985.
My younger son was 9 years old when Spellicopter was published. Today a friend found this link to a YouTube video of Spellicopter being played. Pig out—we loved this! I actually think the YT demo shows the player crashing at the end of each run when they should have beamed the letters down to spell the word on the ground and then landed for more points, but who am I to remember that detail? The instruction manual is probably long gone.
I especially like the humorous touches on the title page (view the video to see) and the little tune that plays. I “composed” a whole bunch of these for our games and still use one of them as an iPhone ringtone.
[youtube W_5d-hcE_d8]
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