Blast to the past: Brøderbund's Living Books

As some of you may know, I always post retro things to my YouTube channel. A few years ago, I posted a few videos with demos of me playing some old interactive books from a defunct company known as Brøderbund. They had a whole product line called the Living Books series. These were amazing interactive, animated children's books.

These products were amazing in that they offered so much multimedia (animated graphics, sound effects and music) for the time. This was software that could really put your (early 90s) multimedia PC's or Mac's capabilities to good use. I used to have hours on end of good fun from these games since the in-game world was so responsive to your actions.

The fascinating thing I found about the videos I uploaded was how popular they were. My YouTube channel has over a million views, the bulk of which is supplied by views of the Living Books videos that I posted. Many people post comments to ask me to post more gameplay videos. I would, if I owned more Living Books, but even now I only posess Just Grandma and Me, Arthur's Teacher Trouble, The Tortoise and the Hare and Ruff's Bone. All of them are great titles that offer hours of enjoyment.

You might be thinking that these wonderful products are now lost in the mists of time. You would have been right about that until recently. A company named Wanderful, Inc. has revived many of the Living Books titles on mobile Apple devices. Pretty apt, since a lot of parents these days buy iPads for their kids. Check them out here.