SpaceKids

SpaceKids is a video game in the adventure genre developed by Evryware and published by MicroProse Software, Inc. originally released in 1996. It is currently playable on DOS.

Zeet and Deedle's grandfather is a great explorer, but he hasn't returned to the Moon from his last destination - Earth! His grandchildren are tasked with tracking him down and rescuing him from whatever Earthly threat has been holding him back, after interacting with a wide range of whimsical and surreal characters.

SpaceKids is a good sample of what interactive movies were like just before the CD-ROM format became the new standard for storing extensive multimedia content: instead of digitized actors with many megabytes, we have pre-rendered sprites in bytes versus 3D backgrounds, which rotate around the screen and stretch or deflect in real time with every possible bump or nudge. To please the kids, almost everything that isn't made of candy has a human face with big, pleading eyes somewhere.

Gameplay loosely follows the model established by Dragon's Lair: non-interactive (sometimes lengthy) animated segments are punctuated by episodes of player intervention, which consist of moving the actor of the moment - sometimes our protagonists, sometimes their opponent - in the right direction at the right time to pass some timed obstacle or choose a fork in the plot. Unlike Dragon's Lair, death doesn't lurk around every corner; failing to successfully overcome the obstacle (or, uh, vaguely interact with the strange new situation in the arbitrarily appropriate manner) usually just yields another opportunity to do so.

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.