Socrates

Circa 1988, my mother must have been fearful that playing so much Nintendo was turning my brain to shit that she bought the Socrates educational video gaming system.

First off, as a bit of background, the system came with several preloaded programs dealing with math, vocabulary, music, and art.  We never bought any of the gaming cartridges, so even the most entertaining aspects of Socrates grew tiresome.  Luckily for me, we bought the likes of Punchout!, Ducktales, and Contra.  But instead of harking on the negatives, let me tell you what I enjoyed most about the Socrates system.

1.  There was a vocabulary program which was basically a version of Hangman.  Yep, the popular guessing game that most everyone enjoys as a child was the best this system had to offer.  So in a time before my family bought its first PC, being able to play a version of hangman by myself was an entertaining option. 

2.  When I wasn't playing Hangman I was trying to create a masterpiece in the Super Painter program.  I'd say this program can easily be compared to the basic paint programs that still come preloaded on computers today.  While no adult in their right mind is going to attempt to draw using one of these basically paint programs, I'm sure some kids still get some enjoyment playing around the first few times with it.  That's what I was dealing with in the late 80s.  The first hundred times or so, it was fun to be able to use the spray paint options to write something on the screen but it eventually grew dull.  

3.  Socrates was a cool looking robot.  Socrates himself was a blatant rip off of Johnny 5, who was in himself awesome.  In 1988, a few short years after the release of the movie Short Circuit, there was no cooler robot than Johnny 5. Clearly the people at Mattel agreed and modeled their bot in a similar fashion.  They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery but I'm sure if this gaming system actually made any money, the people at Tri-Star might have had something to say about a little copyright infringement.       

4.  The way the graphics and color loaded was very cool.  Whenever a new screen would load, it would draw out the graphics and then fill them in with color.  Still to this day, this is a cool graphics effect to me.  Better than me describing it, if you haven't already, take a look at the video I included at the top so you have a better idea of what I mean.

That's it.  I couldn't even come up with a fifth reason.  I guess that's explanation enough as to why Socrates never made it big.