Number Munchers

Number Munchers came from MECC, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. The state legislature founded it in 1973, and it dominated the market for Apple II software in schools. The game was a 1986 Apple II spin-off of MECC's Word Munchers, released the year before. Its concept came from R. Philip Bouchard, who also led the design of the 1985 Apple II version of The Oregon Trail. The idea was simple enough to explain in one sentence: a rule appears at the top of the screen (multiples of 3, say), and you steer the Muncher around a grid of numbers eating every one that fits. Eat a wrong one and you lose a life. The five modes covered multiples, factors, primes, equalities and inequalities, aimed at grades four through eight, and teachers could set the difficulty.

The Troggles made it a game instead of a worksheet. It was often compared to Pac-Man. There were five species, each with a mock-Latin name and a way of moving: the Reggie (Trogglus normalus) walked in straight lines, the Bashful ran from you, the Helper ate the answers before you could, the Worker put new numbers on the board, and the Smartie, with big teeth and glasses, followed you everywhere. A second Troggle joined at level 4 and a third at level 8. Safety squares gave brief shelter, and Troggles sometimes ate each other. Every third level you got a cartoon from the "Great Moments in Muncher History" series, like Munchers reenacting William Tell or a Muncher carving itself into Mount Rushmore. From December 1 to 25 the Muncher wore a Santa hat, if the computer knew the date.

MS-DOS and Macintosh versions followed in 1990, carrying it into the '90s. MECC was spun off from the state in 1991 and bought in 1995 by SoftKey, which later took the name The Learning Company, and the game was eventually renamed Math Munchers. PC Magazine later listed it among the top 10 educational PC games of the '80s.