Awesome Animated Monster Maker: Creating Nonsense.
Greetings and today we’ve got a neat little program that I recently got in a box of goodies. Awesome Animated Monster Maker, developed by the ImaginEngine Corporation and released in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Interactive for Macintosh and Windows PCs.
My interest was piqued as soon as I unboxed this in my October 2018 donations video, and judging by the comments I got about it a fair number of you were as well. While I don’t have any memories of playing this as a youngin, it sure seems like the kind of thing I might’ve enjoyed.
I mean just look at that cover art, I would’ve been all over this when I was 7 or 8 years old. This program was one of the first pieces of software from HMI’s CreActive series in the mid ‘90s. A main selling point was that it included both enjoyable software for young children, as well as some additional real world activities so that kids wouldn’t be sitting in front of a computer all day.
So it wasn’t quite classified as edutainment, but it went out of its way to make a point that kids could indeed still learn something from it. Potentially, maybe, eh they tried. Later entries in the Monster Maker series were more blatantly educational, but this one really is just an activity center.
And it turns out that a sealed, original big box copy like this is pretty darn rare so thanks again to Chris and Karen for the donation and the opportunity to crack it open and enjoy the complete package like it’s 1995. Straight away inside you get the A2M2 Activity Book, one of the biggest selling points if the box’s marketing copy is to be believed.
Fun! Games! Puzzles! Tricks and tips! Even monstrous recipes and coloring book pages. Yep, it’s a book of kids activities all right, very much reminding me of those booklets found in supermarket checkout lines purchased by flustered parents as a last ditch effort to get little Billy to calm the heck down during the final leg of a longer than anticipated road trip to visit Aunt Gretchen in Rhode Island.
Next up is a brief pamphlet detailing more of Houghton Mifflin’s interactive computer software thingymajigs, as well as a software registration card for registering the software with a card. And finally there’s the jewel case holding both the software on CD-ROM and a small instruction manual.
The latter isn’t much to look at, mostly talking about how to install and troubleshoot the thing, along with a grand total of three pages describing the product itself. Which is fine, because once you get Awesome Animated Monster Maker installed you get a debatably awesome non-animated monster maker tutorial walkin’ ya through the whole thing.
-”Monster Maker lets you make a zillion different monsters!” -”Click on the platforms to see new monster parts.” -“Stick the parts together in the Monster Chamber to build the monster of your dreams!” At any time you can jump into the main program where you’ll be greeted by Doctor Lizardlips: a reptilian mad scientist in charge of the Main Lab.
-”Now YOU start dragging monster parts to the body!” Well, the player’s the one in charge, while the doc stands there remarking on your work while occasionally pulling on a rubber ducky at your behest. But yeah, the whole idea of this is to go about monster-making with animated awesomeness, accomplished by clicking, dragging, and dropping any of the parts on-screen.
You get arms, legs, torsos, eyeballs, fuzzy bits, and even brains to adjust the traits and voice of your monster. Everything attaches to everything else, kinda like the game Spore but a good thirteen years earlier. There are also squeezable color pickles to mix up your creation’s aesthetic, either all at once or part by part.
And finally, there’s a piece of Luggage called Rubbage that will delete your monster, and an angry gray blob with a monocle known as the Exit Bug who will take you away from the current room. -”EXIT!” Speaking of rooms there are six more of them after the Main Lab, all of which are selected through the Foyer.
We’ll start with the Sewer Show hosted by Slippo and Mergatroid. This is a room dedicated to song and dance, with no real goal except to mess around and have fun. Truthfully that’s the goal of the entire program: screwing around and seeing what happens.
In this case it comes down to clicking on the instrument monsters and pressing various keyboard keys to make your own monster join in the cacophony. Next we’ll head to Kelpy’s Undersea World, a watery realm that provides access to all kinds of accessories for your monster.
It’s also a good example of A2M2’s randomly-generated dialogue. -”Monster, do you ever tickle a porpoise with electric eel earwax?” -”When pigs fly!” There are a preset number of recordings of course, but for every quote unquote “conversation” you have, the outcome will be randomly determined from a library of lines.
This ends up feeling like a game of Mad Libs playing itself in front of you, it’s weird stuff but it works. Next we’ll hit up the Personality Parlor, a room with a monstrous pipe organ and an array of cuckoo clocks that alter your monster’s mind. Again it’s just about having fun with what the program has on offer, so if you want an angry monster that’s continually quoting classic English literature or whatever, this is the place to do it.
-”Woe unto me!” Up next is Diaper Dan’s Squash Court, the obligatory gross room. This is a mid-1990s kids activity center, after all. Dan is a big baby wearing a metallic diaper wielding a giant magnet that attracts garbage, which he smashes into dustballs using his metal-clad diaper butt.
Again, mid-90s kids software, just roll with it. The point of this area is to create new monster parts, accomplished by clicking each of the dustball faucets until you get the number of the part you want. Then clicking the zapper will turn the dust into the associated part.
Yeah you’re constantly getting new pieces to adhere to your monster, so by the end of your experience your creation looks like a Nickelodeon cubist painting. And the final activity is contained within Spaghetti and Meatball’s Kitchen, a cookhouse run by a pile of living noodles and an irritable impaled ball of meat.
-”Monster, I heard your mom likes to feed to lobster lice sprinkled with dog dust!” -”Did your mom ever feed you that?” So the idea here is that every letter of the alphabet has a corresponding ingredient in the kitchen, which you can find by either clicking its location or typing on the keyboard.
And if you enjoy all kinds of ample alliterative awesomeness then this is where it’s at. -”Snore of a slimy sea slug!” -”Half the hair from a happily howling hyena head out of a hole.” Spelling out words results in recipes, creating further possibilities for monster customization.
Not every combination works though, so, sorry: no LGR easter eggs here. Once you’ve reached a self-directed conclusion to the making of your awesome animated monster, you can bring them over into the Photo Studio. Here your monster’s mug is captured for posterity to be displayed in the Rogues Gallery, in either full color or line drawing form, each suitable for printing.
And at this point the only thing left to do is to actually print the thing out and enjoy the uniquely-shaped fruits of your labor on a piece of paper. Neat! And that is Awesome Animated Monster Maker, a delightful creativity and curiosity-driven experience that really is a fun time for people of all ages, exactly like the box art promised.
It’s not likely to keep you occupied for more than ten minutes, at least if you’re someone in their 30s farting around to make a YouTube video that only loosely ties into Halloween. But if I put myself in the sticky shoes of a seven year old in 1995, this program would’ve been more awesome than a handful of soon-to-be-discontinued PB Crisps.
Okay maybe not that awesome but still pretty friggin rad. I was enamored by pretty much any kind of animated CD-ROM activity center at that age and the absurdity of this one would’ve absolutely been my jam, so I’m a tad envious of you LGR viewers that got to play around with this when it was new.
Even if it’s not as involved as the later Ultra Edition of the program, which included a bunch of improvements and even some games to play. At the very least though, the original Awesome Animated Monster Maker is something that still brought a smile to my face and a chuckle to my chuckle-maker over two decades later, and for that I am grateful.
