The Learning Company and all its subsidiaries became Mattel Interactive.īut something was very wrong. Then came the grandaddy acquisition of them all: Mattel bought The Learning Company for $3.6 billion in 1998. After the acquisition, it continued to agglomerate businesses, buying Broderbund (the maker of Carmen Sandiego and Mavis Beacon), MECC (creator of The Oregon Trail), Mindscape, and Creative Wonders. In 1995, The Learning Company was acquired by CD-ROM publisher and distributor Softkey in a hostile takeover. Nevertheless, the company continued to boast outstanding performance, especially in its years as a public company from 1992 to 1995. The Learning Company was not without its troubles, though it cycled through a number of executives between 19, with McCormick leaving in 1985. The games came prepackaged with Apple II computers as the desktop soared in popularity in schools.
IBM contracted the company to create games for the PCjr.
She and her team built a number of acclaimed titles in their early years like Rocky’s Boots, which won Software of the Year awards from several magazines. Sales reached $1 million in 1983, the first year it incorporated, and doubled each subsequent year, according to founder Ann McCormick’s blog. The company exploded soon after its inception. To many, the embodiment of the edutainment industry was The Learning Company, the maker of such classics as “Reader Rabbit,” “Zoombinis,” “The Oregon Trail” and “Carmen Sandiego,” and several others that were popular in classrooms in the 1990s and early 2000s. What can today’s educational game developers learn from that boom-and-bust period? The Heyday of Edutainment Many of the key players from back then see history repeating itself: A crowded market doomed the majority of edutainment companies, just as the App Store's teeming virtual shelves may be doing today. Her disappearance was less intentional and more reflective of the collapse of the edutainment industry.Īftershocks of the collapse of the edutainment industry still trouble today’s teeming edtech market. Once an icon of the educational gaming software in the mid-90’s-also known as the “edutainment” era-Carmen hasn’t been hiding as much as trying to claw her way back from obscurity.
And the market for educational games may be worth $2.3 billion by next year.Ĭarmen may be in plain sight now, but things aren’t the same as when she last appeared. Teachers increasingly blog and write about using game-based learning in their classrooms. The Apple App Store, for instance, boasts 80,000 apps in its “Educational” category. Her re-emergence coincides with a resurgence in the popularity of educational games. Last November, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt released “Carmen Sandiego Returns,” the first iPad and iPhone version of the classic game in which players use their geography knowledge to track Carmen and her goons across the world.