Name: LGR - Awesome Animated Monster Maker
Uploaded: 2020-03-06T20:12:07.000Z
Duration: 9 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Greetings and today we’ve got a neat little program that I recently got in a box of goodies.

Awesome Animated Monster Maker, developed by the ImaginEngine Corporation and released

in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Interactive for Macintosh and Windows PCs.

My interest was piqued as soon as I unboxed this in my October 2018 donations video, and

judging by the comments I got about it a fair number of you were as well.

While I don’t have any memories of playing this as a youngin, it sure seems like the

I mean just look at that cover art, I would’ve been all over this when I was 7 or 8 years old.

This program was one of the first pieces of software from HMI’s CreActive series in

A main selling point was that it included both enjoyable software for young children,

as well as some additional real world activities so that kids wouldn’t be sitting in front

So it wasn’t quite classified as edutainment, but it went out of its way to make a point

that kids could indeed still learn something from it.

Later entries in the Monster Maker series were more blatantly educational, but this

And it turns out that a sealed, original big box copy like this is pretty darn rare so

thanks again to Chris and Karen for the donation and the opportunity to crack it open and enjoy

Straight away inside you get the A2M2 Activity Book, one of the biggest selling points if

the box’s marketing copy is to be believed.

Even monstrous recipes and coloring book pages.

Yep, it’s a book of kids activities all right, very much reminding me of those booklets

found in supermarket checkout lines purchased by flustered parents as a last ditch effort

to get little Billy to calm the heck down during the final leg of a longer than anticipated

road trip to visit Aunt Gretchen in Rhode Island.

Next up is a brief pamphlet detailing more of Houghton Mifflin’s interactive computer

software thingymajigs, as well as a software registration card for registering the software

And finally there’s the jewel case holding both the software

on CD-ROM and a small instruction manual.

The latter isn’t much to look at, mostly talking about how to install and troubleshoot

the thing, along with a grand total of three pages describing the product itself.

Which is fine, because once you get Awesome Animated Monster Maker installed you get a

debatably awesome non-animated monster maker tutorial walkin’ ya through the whole thing.

-”Monster Maker lets you make a zillion different monsters!”

-”Click on the platforms to see new monster parts.”

-“Stick the parts together in the Monster Chamber to build the monster of your dreams!”

At any time you can jump into the main program where you’ll be greeted by Doctor Lizardlips:

a reptilian mad scientist in charge of the Main Lab.

-”Now YOU start dragging monster parts to the body!”

Well, the player’s the one in charge, while the doc stands there remarking on your work

while occasionally pulling on a rubber ducky at your behest.

But yeah, the whole idea of this is to go about monster-making with animated awesomeness,

accomplished by clicking, dragging, and dropping any of the parts on-screen.

You get arms, legs, torsos, eyeballs, fuzzy bits, and even brains to adjust the traits

Everything attaches to everything else, kinda like the game Spore but a good thirteen years

There are also squeezable color pickles to mix up your creation’s aesthetic, either

And finally, there’s a piece of Luggage called Rubbage that will delete your monster,

and an angry gray blob with a monocle known as the Exit Bug who will take you away from

[foyer music plays, monsters sounding off]

Speaking of rooms there are six more of them after the Main Lab, all of which are selected

We’ll start with the Sewer Show hosted by Slippo and Mergatroid.

This is a room dedicated to song and dance, with no real goal except

Truthfully that’s the goal of the entire program: screwing around and seeing what happens.

In this case it comes down to clicking on the instrument monsters and pressing various

keyboard keys to make your own monster join in the cacophony.

Next we’ll head to Kelpy’s Undersea World, a watery

realm that provides access to all kinds of accessories for your monster.

It’s also a good example of A2M2’s randomly-generated dialogue.

-”Monster, do you ever tickle a porpoise with electric eel earwax?”

There are a preset number of recordings of course, but for every quote unquote “conversation”

you have, the outcome will be randomly determined from a library of lines.

This ends up feeling like a game of Mad Libs playing itself in front of you, it’s weird

Next we’ll hit up the Personality Parlor, a room with a monstrous pipe organ and an

array of cuckoo clocks that alter your monster’s mind.

Again it’s just about having fun with what the program has on offer, so if you want an

angry monster that’s continually quoting classic English literature or whatever, this

Up next is Diaper Dan’s Squash Court, the obligatory gross room.

This is a mid-1990s kids activity center, after all.

Dan is a big baby wearing a metallic diaper wielding a giant magnet that attracts garbage,

which he smashes into dustballs using his metal-clad diaper butt.

Again, mid-90s kids software, just roll with it.

The point of this area is to create new monster parts, accomplished by clicking each of the

dustball faucets until you get the number of the part you want.

Then clicking the zapper will turn the dust into the associated part.

Yeah you’re constantly getting new pieces to adhere to your monster, so by the end of

your experience your creation looks like a Nickelodeon cubist painting.

And the final activity is contained within Spaghetti and Meatball’s Kitchen, a cookhouse

run by a pile of living noodles and an irritable impaled ball of meat.

-”Monster, I heard your mom likes to feed to lobster lice sprinkled with dog dust!”

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