The Collection Chamber: SPACEKIDS

Hours Of PC Fun In This Perennial Children's Favourite!

Join Zeedle and Deet on an exciting journey to find their Grandpa. SpaceKids lets your child explore and interactive cartoon world where the outcome of the game is up to the imagination!

Great For Computer Users Ages 4-10
Helps children get better acquainted with computers
Stimulates puzzle-solving skills
Challenges are always within reach
Full-screen animation and musical effects make it as much fun to watch as it is to play

~ from the back of the box

Colorful, creative, and weird, Space Kids hit the MS-DOS scene in 1994. Developed by Evryware Software (seems to be a company comprised of family members - neat!), this game boasted some pretty unique features for the time. They developed other games such as the Ancient Art of War and the Manhunter series, but Space Kids stuck out to me the most personally.

In Space Kids, an interactive story unfolds as the player uses their mouse to guide characters and make certain actions. Multiple branching paths and endings are achievable in this game. For 1994, seeing this kind of interactive movie idea executed in a MS-DOS game seemed really ahead of its time. Of course, games like Dragon’s Lair did release in 1983, but to have this kind of entertainment on your home computer must’ve really been something else.

Zeedle and Deet (left) get in all kinds of scrapes and witness some bizarre sights (right).

The two primary characters you control are a couple of frightening looking, dumpling shaped kids named Zeedle and Deet. You’ll help guide them through this crazy adventure in order to rescue their captured grandfather. Whether you control them or some random side character, most decisions you make will contribute to several of the branching paths. I’ve played through the game multiple times and am still finding new things here and there. The replay-ability is high with this one.

Interestingly enough, all of the story telling is done through the visuals and animations. Not much dialogue is spoken, unless you consider quips such as “doodle dip!” and “no, you first!” riveting and relevant storytelling. Watching these characters get into situations and seeing their emotions with very little dialogue is actually really neat and refreshing for a game of its nature. Creative visual direction without a script takes a lot more time when creating a story, and it’s a commendable feat of this game.

Puzzles are controlled with the mouse with actions indicated by yellow arrows.
Click in time to enter the window's mouth (left) or steer the ship to avoid the pink elephant (right).

Nowadays you can see games doing a similar format, albeit with more character control and gameplay depth. Games like Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain, and Until Dawn are fine examples of the interactive branching movie genre of video games. They all boast hours of character dialogue, long cutscenes, and varied gameplay mechanics among other features. To take a second though and look back, it’s really fascinating to play a rudimentary game like Space Kids. Space Kids did something similar, but with less. It did something of a similar nature, decades ago. It’s compelling to play, even to this day, and it should be noted within the halls of the genre.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox Daum build of DOSBox 0.74 to bring the game to modern systems. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 9.50 Mb. Install Size: 20.8 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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