
The rise and fall of the company behind ‘Reader Rabbit’ and other games (2018) - esalazar
https://theoutline.com/post/6293/reader-rabbit-history-the-learning-company-zoombinis-carmen-sandiego?zd=1&zi=bzhzqye6
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jmull
I remember that time. I was at a (much smaller) completing company and I could
tell every time TLC bought another educational software company by the little
flood of resumes came in.

At first I thought they were just stupid (I was naive... “don’t they know
their catalog will run dry if they aren’t refilling it with new titles?!?”).

Then with growing horror I realized they knew perfectly well, that their
company sales numbers were shooting up while their costs were going down.

I thought the payoff would be to milk revenue from the back catalog for a few
years until even that was no longer worth the effort.

But then there was the huge sale to Mattel. They’d found someone with billions
of dollars to spend without the slightest idea how the business worked (or any
business?). I still don’t know why it didn’t matter that the growth was due
only to acquisitions and the cost cutting was due to halting new development
(like losing weight by amputating your legs). I guess Mattel had a “Barbie”
mindset where the popular properties keep producing steady revenue for
decades? Still even something like Barbie gets constant updates.

One insight I have:

There’s no way the execs at Brøderbund and all those other companies didn’t
understand what was going to happen when they sold themselves to “TLC” after
they saw what happened to it. Those execs knew perfectly well they were
selling out their employees and the future of the company. There were fat
bonuses for the execs and sometimes smaller ones for managers when these deals
went down so these people would profit personally while understanding what was
going to happen to the future of their company and the people who worked for
them.

~~~
scarface74
Any investor backed or publicly held company is going to sell out to the
highest bidder without regard to the future of the company or the employees.

Not directed at you, but I never understood why this is always a revelation on
a site run by venture capital firm.

~~~
rossdavidh
You're right, but rarely does management encourage a "we're just here for the
money" kind of employee attitude. More like "we're all a team, let's do great
things together"...until we sell the team and bolt. Should adults know better?
Yes. But, it's still essentially lying, trying to get people to feel loyalty
to an organization (so that they will worker long hours, etc.) while not
feeling any loyalty to it yourself.

But, by now, the pattern is long since clear, yes. But it's so out of whack
with how the rest of human interactions work, that it is perpetually
surprising to most people. It's more or less institutionalized psychopathy.

~~~
scarface74
Unless you work at Netflix. They make their relationship with you very clear.

[https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664](https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664)

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pitchups
Having watched Shark Tank for a long time, I always wondered if Kevin O'Leary
just played a ruthless shark on the show or if he really was one. The article
seems to confirm he is definitely the latter: "He was the soulless
businessperson who just came in and bought a bunch of companies and scaled
them back and laid off all the good people.”

Moreover, he manages to sell TLC for $3.5 billion to Mattel, which is forced
to sell it for just $27 million 18 months later. Of course, that was a poor
decision by Mattel's then CEO, considering she was warned not to do the deal:
"TLC was a “house of cards.” The business was boosting its revenue by
purchasing new companies, but the significant acquisition costs weren’t
reflected in their top-line earnings."

Interesting that another shark on the show - Mark Cuban - also became a
billionaire by selling his company to Yahoo at its peak, and Yahoo then
essentially shutting it down.

~~~
fullshark
The article has a paragraph basically claiming the internet / apps would have
killed those companies anyway and I think I agree. Perhaps a more visionary
businessman could have found a way to develop the IP in a transition but
ultimately they were kind of doomed like most games companies are. It's a
brutal industry.

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Alreadyobsolete
The Logical Adventure of the Zoombinis and Reader Rabbit are so nostalgic
parts of my childhood. I so vividly remember trying to teach myself boolean
logic at age 7 or 8 because of the "boolies".

Turns out those games are actually on Steam!

~~~
matthewwiese
I, too, grew up on the first-ever Zoombinis game. I actually recently played
through it again almost 15+ years later. Everything from the sound effects to
the visuals is seared somewhere deep in my neural wetware like a permanent ROM
chip. Funnily enough, some of the puzzles still confused me! I guess my
colorblindness certainly hasn't been magically cured over time...

Thanks so much to OP for linking this article.

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trimbo
> At its peak in 1998, O’Leary sold TLC to Mattel for an astounding $3.5
> billion — 4.5 times The Learning Company’s annual revenue.

This is a weird footnote because 4.5x price to sales is not that crazy above
the market average of ~1.5 at the time of this acquisition. It would make
sense for a growth industry in the midst of the Dot Com boom in 98. It's
certainly not crazy today, where companies trade at many times that (Pinterest
trades at a 18x multiplier).

Great article by the way. I loved Rocky's Boots.

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jccalhoun
I am too old to have had educational videogames as a child so I have always
wondered if they actually were "educational." Do people who played these games
as a kid feel as if they actually learned something from them?

(Of course we can learn things from any game but I'm just wondering if people
feel educational games were more educational than, say, Civilization)

~~~
gwern
You can probably guess from the conflation of entertainment with education in
the article:

> Buckleitner, who has been reviewing educational games since 1984, assured me
> of their quality. “They were good!” he said. “They had animation, music… for
> the first time you had actors speaking, kind of like comic books. They teach
> higher order thinking, so they fit well with school curricula.” That I never
> thought about it means they were doing their job.

Personally, I never felt I learned much from TLC games as a kid (although I
enjoyed some games), and what I did learn I could've learned as well or better
reading books or doing regular exercises.

In general, educational and brain-training games don't work, likewise, handing
out laptops, and the better the experiment you run, the smaller the effects
are. (This is true of education experiments in general, where effects are
typically near zero.) Just because something is _entertaining_ doesn't mean
it's _educational_ , and just because something is educational, doesn't mean
it's _more_ educational than what a kid would otherwise be doing, or
educational about _useful_ things.

~~~
duskwuff
> Personally, I never felt I learned much from TLC games as a kid (although I
> enjoyed some games), and what I did learn I could've learned as well or
> better reading books or doing regular exercises.

But would you have read those books or done those exercises as willingly as
you played the games? That's valuable enough on its own.

~~~
gwern
That's a very weak justification for what were very expensive computers and
software.

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harrisonjackson
What are the new edu game powerhouses? Minecraft comes to mind. Does it share
the same age demographic as Zoombinis or Reader Rabbit?

~~~
hedora
I’m looking for educational software; it’s difficult to find anything
comparable to what existed when I was growing up.

I’d definitely pay $10’s for games comparable in quality to turtle, number
munchers, the one with the cups and the fluids where you had to measure out
exact volumes, etc.

This industry reminds me of what happened to atari: the ecosystem got flooded
with $1 garbage, and the quality developers got pushed out.

The game industry recovered due to a technology transition combined with a
business model innovation (more powerful consoles with severe licensing
restrictions to keep quality up).

It is a shame that recovery hasn’t happened for educational software.

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CondensedBrain
It took me a lifetime to realize Reader Rabbit is a play on Peter Rabbit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rabbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rabbit)

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coleifer
I grew up playing number munchers, but we had reader rabbit as well. Since I
already knew how to read at that time, we just referred to reader rabbit as
"Evan's game" (my littlest brother). It seems, in my memory, like the computer
was a source of wonder. The games were strangely austere and left a lot more
room for my imagination to take over (kinda like the difference between
reading a book and watching a movie). Miss those days!

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mysterydip
My school had games from MECC like number munchers and word munchers rather
than reader rabbit, but I see their fate was also being acquired by SoftKey in
95.

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anoncow
My school had Dave.

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hannob
Not directly related to the content, but: This is the second text in a short
time I see where there are animated separation lines between the paragraphs.

Is this some new trend? And am I the only one who finds this exceptionally
irritating?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's an SVG animation, which is kinda interesting, but it's annoying as hell,
like you say.

Perhaps the web dev is a geocities throwback.

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leoc
> For his part, Buckleitner thinks this is too neat of an explanation.

'too neat an explanation'. 'neat' is an adjective, so there's no call for 'of'
here. It's bad enough when people get this wrong in speech ...

~~~
triangleman
[https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30011/how-big-
of...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30011/how-big-of-a-problem-
vs-how-big-a-problem)

~~~
leoc
The dictionary.com quotation proves my point. TFA is neither spoken nor
informal English, it's trying to be broadsheet-quality written journalism. In
that sort of context, using dodgy colloquialisms sounds real dumb like.

