Weβre talking a few years after the height of the Apogee era (Crystal Caves, Commander Keen, Bio Menace), right about the time of the CD-ROM explosion.
I remember a history/trivia quiz built into a digital encylopedia. (Might be one of a collection of quizzes/minigames.) Not Encarta Mindmaze, at least I donβt think. It was a much simpler, rougher design. 2D, black and white, grainy/pixelated, almost βdirtyβ in appearance.
My main memory is of clicking a mousehole, a tiny hotspot on some pages of the quiz (again, not Mindmaze), which took you behind the wall and triggered a mini-game (maybe not at first?), a race against time to locate a bomb planted by some nefarious entity (my brain wants to call it the βtime thiefβ or βtime banditβ) somewhere in a labyrinth of backrooms and passages, in which clicking different hotspots would lead to different areas of the quiz βrealmβ. I remember one cave-like room with a sloping grade, thick with pixelated shadow and gloom. And I could never make heads or tails of my location at any time - of course, it could have just been my stupid kid brain not having full capacity yet. I also remember you would sometimes find a piece of cheese and when you clicked it it said βYou found the cheeseβ or something inane that didnβt actually matter.
I feel compelled to emphasize what felt like to me, even as a young kid, the easter egg-like nature of this mousehole/minigame - like something a designer put in because he was bored and wanted to add a secret diversion.
Casualties were catastrophic.
Needless to say I was really surpirsed to see what I saw.
That's not the gold stuff and the R. King note...What is it exactly? Anyone know?
Fairly certain it wasn't animated, so maybe puppets or stop motion? I can't remember anything about the actual plot just this beginning part where it's a (I think) grandfatherly mouse or some animal sitting in an armchair and he like reads/narrates the story to us but as he's doing that we see it being played out. Think the characters were mice too because I remember it zooms into a little door which opens and there's like another world back there. Perhaps it was a picture of it in the book that we dove into or it was in the room itself, I can't remember. Edit: It may not have been its own show but part of another one?
Spy sap in mice entry.
