Celebrating the end of our first year of deep dives into video game controversies, we bring out of the vault our pilot episode.
Historian Kevin Impellizeri shares a story of a video game controversy to his friends: Elford Stephens, Phil Thomas, and John Dukes. In today's episode, we look back at the Health Hero series, a set of health educational games from the 1990s. We talk about Captain Novolin, Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon, Packy & Marlon, Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus, and The AIDS Avenger, and how they tried to teach kids about diabetes, smoking, asthma, and HIV/AIDS.
Topics discussed include: our ideas for a diabetes-themed game, the amazing lineup of Super NES games the Health Hero series tried to compete with, and whether these strange, possibly terrible games might have actually been a success.
If you want to learn about more recent educational games in a variety of subjects, check out the Games for Change game directory: https://www.gamesforchange.org/games/.
For more on Captain Novolin, check out Cassidy's deep dive over at Bad Game Hall of Fame: https://www.badgamehalloffame.com/captain-novolin/.
Special thanks to Sean-Paul (https://twitter.com/HelloMrKearns).
Editor's Note: The game Kevin mentioned but didn't name near the end of the episode is a 2013 browser game called Auti-sim: https://gamejolt.com/games/auti-sim/12761.
For more on Plague, Inc., check out: https://www.gamesforchange.org/games/plague-inc/.
*Correction: Sculptured Software also developed the SNES version of Mortal Kombat.
Theme Music: Occam's Sikhwee by Sikh Knowledge (Free Music Archive: https://bit.ly/33G4sLO), used under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US (https://bit.ly/33JXogQ)
More info, including show notes and sources at http://scandalousgamespodcast.wordpress.com.
