Zombie Dinos from Planet Zeltoid

Zombie Dinos from Planet Zeltoid is a typical example of the educational discs Philips released in droves for the CD-i, only with a much bigger dose of humor than usual. The game runs on a wild premise: aliens have revived the dinosaurs and unleashed them on Earth, so it's up to the player to bring them back under control. To manage that, the player must learn something about each species, since the right approach always depends on how a dinosaur lived, what it ate, and how it moved. Facts are gathered from a database full of images, text, and spoken narration, and immediately put to use in action segments built around quick thinking and aimed reactions.

The target audience was school-age children, and the presentation reflects that. The graphics combine drawn environments with digitized models, the pace is brisk, and short animated interludes play between segments, narrated by a host who comments on the whole nonsense with a wink. Sound-wise, the disc makes full use of the CD, so the narration is voiced and the music continually shifts mood depending on whether the moment calls for reading or fighting. The educational content is solid and matches the state of knowledge at the time, even though today's picture of what dinosaurs looked like differs from the nineties version in many respects.

At the time, discs like this mattered for CD-i because Philips marketed the machine to families as a multimedia device, not just a games console. Educational discs were meant to prove the machine could do more than play games, and Zombie Dinos was among the more entertaining ones, since it never tried to pass itself off as school. Today what stands out most is its tone: it's learning material unafraid of being silly, loud, and colorful. For collectors it's an interesting record of how education and entertainment mixed together in the mid-nineties. For the kids who received such discs back then, they often left a stronger impression than many a big game, because the combination of spoken word, pictures, and fast action was a genuine novelty on a screen in the living room.