Microsoft Creative Writer

~ the goodbye ~

american kids with a family pc used creative writer. i was ten years old in ankara in 1994 with no home computer, and the closest thing to a word processor in the apartment was the typewriter my mother kept in a wooden case under the bookshelf. the microsoft kids catalog never made the jump to a turkish bilgisayar shop shelf in any kind of run. the first time i used word at all was in 2002 in an internet cafe on a pirated office 97 install, by which point creative writer 2 had been out for six years already and was buried in north american closets.

what creative writer actually was: a word processor for children released by microsoft home in early 1994 under its microsoft kids subsidiary. you opened the app and you were inside a building called imaginopolis. each floor of the building held a different writing tool. in those days. a purple cartoon helper named mczee floated around the toolbars offering tips in a synthesized voice. the file format was proprietary, named.max. word could not open it and neither could anything else. it shipped first on cd-rom and 3.5 inch floppies. it ran on windows 3.1 then windows 95.

the sequel, creative writer 2, shipped in october 1996 with a more cartoony splash screen and a few new toys. fine artist was the companion paint program from the same 1994 launch, sharing the mczee universe. by the late nineties microsoft was winding down the consumer microsoft home label and reorganizing the kids and reference titles into other divisions. no creative writer 3 ever shipped. the line stopped getting updates around 1996 and disappeared from retail as office word reached down into the family pc market.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the actual product ~

creative writer was built around the idea that a word processor for a child should look like a place rather than a sheet of paper. when you opened it you saw the inside of a multi-floor building. you took the elevator to whichever floor matched the task. the writing floor had a normal page with cartoon toolbar icons, while another floor held a gallery of bitmap clipart that schoolchildren could drop into a report. mczee floated around offering hints. you could attach sound effects to letters so that pressing return triggered a vacuum suction noise and selecting the whole page and hitting delete fired off a small cartoon explosion.

the design philosophy was the one microsoft bob had also tried to sell to adults, that a software product for the general public did not need to look like a tool, it could look like a friend. the kids version felt less embarrassing than bob did because the target audience was actually the audience the cartoons had been drawn for. the press treated it kindly when it shipped. by 1996 the model felt dated to its readers, who had already moved on to kid pix and the magic school bus cd-roms.

~ where it sat in the catalog ~

microsoft home was the consumer-software label microsoft built in 1993 to compete with broderbund and the learning company in the family pc aisle. inside it sat microsoft kids for children's productivity titles, with creative writer and fine artist as the original two productivity products. encarta and bookshelf lived in microsoft home on the reference side. 3d movie maker followed under microsoft kids in 1995. mczee was the recurring host across most of the kids line. michael shapiro did the voice work, sharing direction with the bob character from earlier that same year.

the whole label leaned on the same bet about home computing that bob did. a desktop computer in the family room would have a parent doing taxes in money and a child writing a school report in creative writer. the home pc would mostly run aol and netscape instead. by 1998 microsoft was retrenching the consumer line toward windows and office. the kids brand slowly fell out of new development as the reorganization moved the team and the budget elsewhere.

~ what got buried with it ~

the.max format died with the app. no later word processor opened it natively. the mczee character followed creative writer into the basement room where the rest of the discontinued microsoft cartoon helpers waited next to clippy and bob. comic sans, which creative writer and fine artist used heavily for their friendlier text, made the jump out of the microsoft kids catalog into windows 95 plus and from there into every birthday card on the internet for the next thirty years. the rest of the line did not.

what survived is the proof of concept rather than the product. a generation of north american children spent a few afternoons with creative writer and came away thinking that a computer could be the place a story lived, not just the typewriter it was typed on. by the time those kids grew up that idea was already inside word as a default behavior, no friendly purple cartoon man required.

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