I’m not sure if I can adequately prepare you for how bizarre The Museum of Anything Goes is. Let me first take you back to 1995. While the operating system was superseded that year, the important thing to know about Windows 3.1 was that it wasn’t a platform for video games. At the time, most games ran natively on DOS. You could launch them from Windows, but they’d just quit to DOS prompt and start from there.

But there were native Windows 3.1 games, it’s just that most of them sucked. Except Skifree and a few other games from the Microsoft Entertainment Packs that were available. Actually, Skifree isn’t that good, it’s just really memorable because you are always devoured by a yeti at the end. Chip’s Challenge is a better example of a good Windows 3.1 game. Most of the rest were just half-assed ports of arcade titles with legally distinct names.

The ones that weren’t legally distinct arcade ports were multimedia games. Think FMV titles like Night Trap. These leveraged the fairly new CD-ROM technology to show grainy video and were barely interactive. The Windows 3.1 multimedia games, however, were often not games at all, but rather were just experiences filled with little activities filled with video and too much audio. I’m drawing a blank on examples here. It’s tempting to call the original incarnation of Microsoft Encarta a multimedia game, even though it was supposed to be an encyclopedia. So, I’m instead going to give you Adventures Through McDonaldland and pretend everyone knows what I’m talking about.

Anyway, that’s kind of what The Museum of Anything Goes is. Except much more baffling.

I HOPE I DON’T LEARN ANYTHING

The Museum of Anything Goes is a precise moniker. You find yourself at the door of a museum of sorts. It’s tempting to say that it’s an art museum, but skeletons walk around complaining about archaeologists and some of the exhibits are interactive. But mainly, you poke at paintings on the wall and things happen.

There’s no goal, as far as I can tell. If there’s an endpoint, it never arrived in my experience. There are a few dozen pictures hanging on the wall and, true to the name, there’s very little rhyme or reason to what unfolds when you click on them. It’s hard to really figure out who, exactly, this game is supposed to be for.

The nature of the game perhaps suggests that this is something parents would install for their kids to keep them distracted while they shoot heroin. There’s a clown near the door, a dancing family, and everything makes ridiculous noises. The whole experience is laced with a simple, juvenile humour. It almost feels like you’re supposed to be learning something, and maybe you will, but it’s the sort of introspective learning you do when faced with something inexplicable.

LESBIAN VIBES

Among the experiences are a series of videos about riding on a snowmobile, and for some reason, I picked up lesbian vibes off of it. There’s one that is just video from a commuter train in (I think) Chicago. I actually enjoyed that one, even though it was done in really choppy Macromedia video. There’s also a series of interviews with children suffering through Chicago’s school system. That’s kind of neat.

But then, there’s one where, by clicking into it, you cause some dude to fall to his death. Museum of Anything Goes then asks you to dig his grave and attend his funeral. There are “dead letters” from people going back to the ‘60s, some of them discussing recreational drugs. One of them is some sort of religious event where they re-enact the crucifixion of Jesus. You know, kid’s stuff.

And that’s… kind of mesmerizing. Like most multimedia games, it’s incredibly clunky. Just getting around feels terrible, as it’s all frame-by-frame mouse-driven stuff. I can’t imagine what it was like running on an old 1x CD-ROM drive.

But the fact that you never know what you’re going to get hit by makes it hard to leave. Even navigating the corridors, you’ll find people who scream that they can’t escape from their skin. Secret panels reveal ants from space who sing a terrible song. It’s not that I ever expected to find something that made the whole experience worth it, but rather that the experience itself was worth it.

THE WORST

The easy question I asked earlier is “who is this even for?” But the question I’m more interested in is “How was this even made?”

Well, the company who published it was Wayzata Technology whose whole thing was CD-ROMs. Stuff like factbooks and soundbanks and cartoons and photobanks. That was their business: CD-ROMs. Specifically CD-ROMs for Mac, as they spent most of their existence porting another company’s discs to Mac. They hit when the technology was new and carved out a niche, but it was going to be a short-lived niche. They closed in 1996 after it became clear the business was no longer viable.

During the brief time Wayzata existed, they published whatever. This includes discs full of art; notably art by Josepha Haveman, which, according to founder Mark Englebardt, sold pretty well. They were essentially fucking around and finding out. Their costs were low, so they could take risks. Even Englebardt suggests it was just two guys screwing around with Macromedia Director. The guys in question were Michael Markowski and Maxwell S. Robertson.

ANYTHING GOES

So, that’s how it happened. It’s technically shovelware. In 1996, Wired named it one of the worst ever CD-ROMs. They wrote, “If you took 100 monkeys, gave them all cam-corders, copies of Macromedia Director, and a year at art school, this would be the result.”

Which, I think is kind of neat. Video game development tools are more accessible than ever, so, these days, “anything goes” is a pretty common design philosophy. In fact, in my recent interview with Cosmo D, he used the exact phrasing when talking about how he got into game design.

But while the ‘80s allowed for that “anything goes” mentality as folks cut their teeth programming arcade clones on the Apple II or Commodore 64, the ‘90s were more closed off and corporate. So, to find a game like The Museum of Anything Goes is a weird rarity. It’s almost like Harvester, it’s a brief spark of something human in an industry that was feeling more and more impersonal. It’s a weird and fascinating window into a flash of a moment in a forgotten corner of the artform.

Should you play it? No. Maybe? Sure.

5/10

This review was conducted using a freely available version run through DOSBox. You can find it on Archive.org.