3-D Dinosaur Adventure
Knowledge Adventure's 1993 CD-ROM theme park of dinosaurs, with the 3D glasses in the box, a virtual museum, and a first-person mode where you saved the dinosaurs from the comet. The edutainment disc that lived in the family PC's CD caddy.
Knowledge Adventure, founded in 1991 and building MS-DOS titles through 1997, shipped 3-D Dinosaur Adventure on CD-ROM on December 20, 1993, the year Jurassic Park put dinosaurs back on every kid's wall. It was laid out as a theme park with areas to explore: an encyclopedia, a quiz, a virtual museum, fossil identification from photo records and illustrations, and special areas built for the 3D glasses packed in the box. The part everyone remembers is the Doom-style game in which the player runs through a first-person world trying to save the dinosaurs from the comet about to hit the Earth.
Reviews treated it as a reference tool with fireworks: the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio guide praised its "text, beautiful graphics, and amazing sound effects" while warning that it needed 10 megabytes of disk space and a sound card, and PC Magazine found the effects limited but the reference solid. It collected a 1994 Oppenheim Platinum Award, the Software Publishers Association's 1994 award for Best Overall Education Program, an honorable mention at the March 1994 Electronic Entertainment Editors' Choice Awards and a place on PC Magazine's 1994 top 100 CD-ROMs. Random House carried it into bookstores from September 1994 and into the UK and Ireland the next summer.
Macintosh and Windows 3.x versions followed on June 18, 1996, a Windows edition and an Anniversary Edition in 1997, and it was still the third-best-selling Macintosh product in the week ending October 11, 1997. Knowledge Adventure was bought by CUC International in a deal completed in January 1997, merged with Davidson & Associates in 1998 and renamed JumpStart Games in 2012; the company re-released 3-D Dinosaur Adventure digitally in November 2014 beside its Body, Space and Undersea siblings, then closed for good in July 2023. Bustle's 2016 verdict, "a glorified encyclopedia," is roughly what its fans loved about it.
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