You, the player, had to travel from room to room answering “riddles” in the form of questions about various subjects contained in the electronic pages of Encarta. Mind Maze was a trivia game set in a cursed castle in which the inhabitants were trapped. I say that Encarta was not a game, but like the screensaver program After Dark, it was a non-game program that contained a game within it. Yes, my name in Mind Maze is Max Action, because it perfectly describes me. I’m not sure whether Microsoft ever succeeded in that goal, but in 1996 when Encarta 97 was released it sure seemed to have a hell of a lot of articles. The idea behind Encarta, at least as I understand it, was that it would provide said average family with all the information contained in a massive, heavy, extremely expensive set of Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book volumes without being expensive or weighty. Microsoft began producing the Encarta series in 1993, a few years before the average family had a dial-up subscription and several years before the internet was more than a mess of bad corporate websites and pornography hosted on Angelfire pages. The best description I can come up with today, twenty years into the age of the internet, is that it is an extremely gimped version of Wikipedia with some amusing tools and features added. If you’re under 20 years of age, you likely have no idea what an Encarta is.

Also, there are unused icons on my desktop. I’m running this copy on Windows XP, but try to imagine Windows 95 instead.

Encyclopedia encarta game 90s