Sesame Street: Numbers

Sesame Street: Numbers belongs to the educational discs with which Philips defended the idea that the CD-i was not a games console but a multimedia device for the whole family, sitting under the television. The title uses the license of the famous children's show and its puppet characters, who guide preschoolers through their first steps in counting. The content is divided into short activities: finding a specified number of objects in a scene, ordering digits, simple addition using pictures, and recognizing shapes and sounds. Everything is designed so a child can handle the controls alone, using slow cursor movement and a single confirm button, and so no mistake leads to punishment, only a new attempt and encouragement.

Technically, the disc relies above all on sound and video. The characters speak and sing, the narration is voiced by the show's actual actors, and short songs and animated interludes play between tasks, giving the child a familiar setting even outside of television broadcasts. The picture combines drawn scenes with video, and today one notices the limited resolution of the era's format, though the coloring and editing rhythm still follow the same rules as the show itself. It was precisely this faithfulness to the source that was the main reason parents bought discs like this.

At the time, educational titles made up a large part of the CD-i catalog and were sold in stores alongside the machine as proof of its usefulness. Reviewers judged them differently from games, that is, by whether they engaged children and whether they carried genuine educational content, and by that measure the Sesame Street series held up better than average. Today the disc is interesting mainly as a record of one path home entertainment could have taken: slow, gentle, non-competitive software for the very young, of a kind that almost vanished from game consoles in later years. Anyone who runs such a disc today sees a piece of the era's vision of family electronics, one in which the television was meant to serve learning just as much as play, and in which a preschooler first got a controller in their hands.