Microsoft Dangerous Creatures

~ the goodbye ~

dangerous creatures was the kind of thing a north american eight year old asked for as a birthday present in 1994 if the household had a cd-rom drive. i was ten in ankara that summer with no home computer and the wild-animal corner of the household was discovery channel reruns dubbed over for trt and a tattered paperback called hayvanlar ansiklopedisi on the lower shelf. microsoft home discs did not ride the turkish bilgisayar shelf in any visible run for the kids reference line. the first time i actually read about dangerous creatures was a wikipedia article years later.

dangerous creatures shipped in august 1994 from microsoft home for windows 3.1 as one of the first single-subject reference cd-roms the label put out alongside the second edition of encarta. the cover art was a leopard mid-snarl. the inside was a clickable atlas of animals dangerous to humans, organized by country in one mode and by attack mechanism in another, with teeth or venom serving as the entry points. robert zink narrated the video clips, bill birney composed the music, and the bbc and national geographic licensed in the footage.

no version 2 ever shipped. by 1995 microsoft had moved on to a wider single-subject line that picked up ancient lands and microsoft dinosaurs, with dangerous creatures sliding into clearance bins as the catalog turned over. no formal discontinuation announcement. the disc became part of the bundle microsoft home licensed to oem pc builders for windows 95 boxes, and then quietly stopped getting pressed entirely.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the review pull from the era is mostly polite. pc mag thought it was the kind of disc a parent could leave on the desktop while a child poked around safely. the washington post had a column noting that users could lose an hour inside the atlas. the school-library channel took it well. the home-retail channel mostly did not buy it standalone, the units that shipped did so as oem bundles on family pcs from compaq and packard bell.

this part you had to be in the english speaking pc-home market for. the product worked when there was nothing else like it on a screen. by 1996 the web had a small but growing set of free animal-fact sites, the encarta yearbook added more video content each cycle, and the standalone disc lost its reason to exist. honestly, the single-subject reference cd-rom was a 1993 to 1996 category that did not survive the web getting comfortable.

~ the long tail ~

dangerous creatures lives on internet archive now as an emulated cd, a museum object for the people who were in third grade when the leopard cover art was on the family pc. the video clips inside have aged unevenly, the bbc footage still looks like bbc footage and the interface art looks like 1994 art. the microsoft home label that wrapped the product was wound down through the late nineties, with the kids and reference titles reorganized into other divisions and eventually retired. nothing inside the current microsoft catalog replaces it. wikipedia took the role of "click here to read about dangerous animals" away from the cd-rom category permanently around 2003.

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