Like Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island, Joins the Parade was built on the SCUMM engine, which Gilbert brought with him to his new studio, under certain conditions: “The deal that I arranged with is that I could continue to use and work on the SCUMM engine, but any changes I made would flow back to Lucasfilm.
Smokey the Fire Engine, who gives Putt-Putt advice, would become a mainstay of the series. (Fox was also a co-author of the influential 1982 programming textbook Armchair Basic.) Animator Brad Carlton and audio engineer Tom McGurk would soon become some of Humongous’s most recognizable contributors. Newer faces included writer-designers Annie Fox and Laurie Rose Bauman, who had worked together on the 1991 adventure game Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, one of the earliest titles of its kind to use full-motion video. Programmers Brad Taylor (as previously mentioned, a co-developer of SCUMM), Bret Barrett, and Tami Borowick had all worked with Gilbert on the 1991 Secret of Monkey Island sequel LeChuck’s Revenge. The duo were joined by a group consisting of both LucasArts alumni and up-and-coming talent. The game truly was a labour of love, with Day and Gilbert working as designers on the project in addition to their corporate roles. Joins the Parade was first released for MS-DOS in late 1992 (sources differ regarding whether the title was released in November or December that year). The original box art for Joins the Parade. Over the next few years, LucasArts quickly amassed critical and commercial acclaim for its varied roster of innovative titles, the first of which was the 1984 sports game Ballblazer, and eventually moved towards influential point-and-click adventures, including Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island (more on that in a bit).
Both had recently left their jobs at LucasArts (previously known as Lucasfilm Games), the studio created by Star Wars director George Lucas in 1982 as a branch of his main company, Lucasfilm. The story of Putt-Putt Joins the Parade is also the story of Humongous Entertainment, founded in late October of 1992 by producer Shelley Day and designer/programmer Ron Gilbert.
All visual sources, including the header, are from MobyGames unless otherwise cited. Joins the Parade is not only one of the most beloved edutainment games released in the Nineties – it’s one of the most groundbreaking as well, born of both years of experience and a desire to change the face of educational software. Today marks the first article in this column about an edutainment game from the 1990s, and, fittingly enough, it’s about one of the earliest titles from that era: Putt-Putt Joins the Parade,released by Humongous Entertainment in 1992. Welcome back to That’s Edutainment,which looks at educational video games of the past and considers whether they hold up today, focusing on their development and on the relationship between education and entertainment. Previous entries can be found here.
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