If you weren’t around in the mid-1990s, you missed out on a lot of things – economic prosperity, the original run of Caroline in the City, a weird drink called Orbitz that had little tiny chewy balls floating in it. But most unfortunately for you, you also missed the golden age of CD-ROMs.
Around 1995 or so, it became standard for home computers to come equipped with a CD-ROM drive. This was a vast improvement over the floppy disks that we had to use before. I don’t know the exact specifications, but I’m going to estimate that a CD-ROM disc could hold fifty gazillion times as much data as a floppy disk.
It also meant we could have computer games with lots of audio and video clips! If you weren’t around back then, you’ll have to take my word for it that this was very exciting. There were the Wing Commander games where the cutscenes featured real live actors including Mark Hamill! There was a Monty Python CD-ROM with a bunch of clips from the Flying Circus TV show! There was a whole series of “animated storybooks” based on Disney movies!
And you know who else made a CD-ROM? Yes, it was the Muppets! Remarkably, this month marks the 25th anniversary of The Muppet CD-ROM: Muppets Inside, the program that MuppetZine’s Danny Horn (who would later found ToughPigs.com) described at the time as “the game that makes buying a computer worthwhile.”
Twenty-five years! Was it really that long ago that we were playing this classic on our IBM-compatible computers? Which is what we used to call PCs? We’ve never really talked about Muppets Inside much on this website, but we should. Because it was fun!
Before Muppets Inside, most video games featuring the Muppets were… not great. Up to that point, the only Muppet games I had played were two different versions of Chaos at the Carnival, on the computer and the original NES. Both versions featured graphics that made the Muppets look like knockoff merchandise of themselves, gameplay that made you want to throw your controller at the TV or one of your siblings, and a storyline that barely seemed Muppety. Kermit rescuing Piggy from a mad scientist? Shouldn’t that be the other way around?!
Muppets Inside, which was written by Craig Shemin and directed by David Gumpel, was a revelation from its first moments. The big attraction is that it was packed with video of the Muppets. A whole lot of that video was brand-new – the premise of the game is that when you start up the Muppets’ new computer game, it breaks, leaving digital versions of the Muppets all over your machine. You have to help Kermit and Fozzie drive around in their “data bus” and play minigames, which allow them to pick up the pieces and reunite with their friends so they can finish putting on a show on your monitor.
There was an impressive amount of new full-motion video material starring the Muppet performers – Steve Whitmire and Frank Oz and all those guys. When you played the minigames, you didn’t get full video, but animation of the characters paired with new audio. Like, they took a frame of Bunsen with his mouth open and a frame of Bunsen with his mouth closed and alternated them to make it look like he was talking. Everyone moved like a robot, but by golly, back then that was good enough for us.
The minigames were all pretty cool. I think my favorite was “Trivial But True,” with Kermit hosting a riff on Hollywood Squares. It’s where I learned that a 128th note in music is also known as a “quasihemidemisemiquaver.” You wouldn’t believe how often that knowledge has come in handy!
The Swedish Chef’s game “Kitchens of Doom” was also a lot of fun and felt very high-tech at the time. It was a parody of the first-person shooter Doom, with the Chef destroying killer vegetables with various utensils. Pretty violent, now that I think about it!
Clifford’s game “Scope That Song” was a Name That Tune-style game. The highlight was the end of each round, where you would be rewarded with a new performance by Animal, Beaker, and the Swedish Chef, the world-famous Leprechaun Brothers.
Two games (“Beaker’s Brain” and “Statler & Waldorf: Two Thumbs Down”) involved unscrambling clips from The Muppet Show… and when you successfully completed the task, you would get to watch the whole clip! I seem to recall that you’d also be presented with clips at the conclusion of the more challenging “Wocka on the Wild Side” (protect Fozzie from the audience’s projectiles) and “Death-Defying Acts of Culture” (fire Gonzo from a cannon). Strangely enough, this was the first way I encountered many of these clips, and the only way I had access to some of them for several years.
Man, we had no idea how primitive everything was back then.
That’s a total of seven minigames. It kind of felt like you had to play each one fifty times to finish the whole game, but each round of each minigame was a little bit different so I wasn’t about to complain. It was like experiencing a new, interactive best-of-The Muppet Show compilation.
At some point I accidentally discovered that if you played the game on your birthday, Kermit and Fozzie would wish you a happy birthday when you loaded the game. I think there may have been similar Easter eggs for Christmas and New Year’s Day. Not only was it a fun game, it was a friendly game!
The CD-ROM also came with a collection of Muppety sound effects and icons you could use on your Windows computer. You better believe my parents heard the Chef going “flop-de-oop” every time they opened a new window to write a very serious e-mail for months after I got the game.
I still have my copy of the Muppets Inside disc somewhere, but I assume there a zero percent chance it’s compatible with the current versions of Windows. Fortunately, there are a few walkthroughs on YouTube (see below), so we can still approximate the thrill of watching Beaker clown around CD-ROM-style.
Today, of course, we can see almost every scene from The Muppet Show by turning on Disney+. But I have to wonder if I appreciated it more when I had to work for it. I could watch the “Muppet Labs” sketch where they turn gold into cottage cheese by clicking on the Shirley Bassey episode… but wasn’t it more satisfying to watch when I had to help Fozzie drive a bus to a square on a map and then spin some freeze-frames around like a Rubik’s cube?
Actually, clicking on Disney+ sounds pretty satisfying too. But I still love Muppets Inside!
Click here to read our interview with Craig Shemin, in which he shares his memories of working on Muppets Inside!
Thanks to Hfric`s Gaming Backlog for uploading a walkthrough on YouTube!
Click here to reminisce about the Windows 95 era on the Tough Pigs forum!
by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com
