''Opening Night'' is a 1995 education/simulation video game by

MECC The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (later Corporation), most commonly known as MECC, was an organization founded in 1973 best known for developing the edutainment video game series ''The Oregon Trail (series), The Oregon Trail'' and i ...

, and developed in cooperation with The Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis. It is aimed at children aged 10 and up.

Gameplay

Players create, direct, and perform mystery plays in a lifelike theatre, featuring The Children's Theatre Company actors in period costumes. They do this by manipulating multimedia including 40 actors, 100 sets, and 300 props to create stories. Lighting, music, and sound effects can be later added. To access an item, players first choose the Category Viewer to choose the category, then next the Item Viewer to choose the item.

Double-click A double-click is the act of pressing a computer mouse button twice quickly without moving the mouse. Double-clicking allows two different actions to be associated with the same mouse button. It was developed by Tim Mott of Xerox Palo Alto Resear ...

ing on the item places it onto the stage. The game was

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-driven; it aimed to allow students to use their creativity to write scripts and create plays for assessments, and to use their imagination. A timer helps synchronise actions, while the recorder is used to capture action.

Text-to-speech Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware, hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system conv ...

technology allows the player to hear the character say what they have written, but if words are mispronounced they are encouraged to type the words out phonetically instead. ''Star Tribune'' commented that the dialogue can either appear at the bottom of the screen like movie

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, or spoken in a "

Stephen Hawking Stephen William Hawking (8January 194214March 2018) was an English theoretical physics, theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between ...

monotone".

Development

The actors were added by first being filmed or photographed then digitized into the game, in a similar vein to ''

Mortal Kombat ''Mortal Kombat'' is an American media franchise centered on a series of fighting game, fighting video games originally developed by Midway Games in 1992. The original ''Mortal Kombat (1992 video game), Mortal Kombat'' arcade game spawned Lis ...

''. A bonus expansion pack named ''Opening Night Behind the Scenes'' was released in 1995 on Windows 3.1 and Macintosh. It was developed in cooperation with The Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis and published by MECC. The disk illustrated how the game was made and showed how a theatre operates. Players could watch interviews by industry professionals from The Children's Theatre Company and look up terms in a glossary. The CD also include

Quicktime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

movies showing tours of different aspects of the theatre.

Release

Dale LaFrenz, MECC president and chief executive officer, commented that she expected ''Opening Night'', alongside '' MayaQuest'' and ''Math Munchers Deluxe'', to be released in time for the pre-holiday selling season of 1995. The game was the 73rd best-selling title during the November–December 1995 period (

holiday season The Christmas season or the festive season, also known as the holiday season or the holidays, is an annual period generally spanning from November or December to early January. Incorporating Christmas Day and New Year's Day, the various celebrat ...

Critical reception

Star Tribune ''The Minnesota Star Tribune'', formerly the ''Minneapolis Star Tribune'', is an American daily newspaper based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As of 2023, it is Minnesota's largest newspaper and the List of newspapers in the United States, seventh- ...

'' positively compared

's ''Opening Night'' (1995) to

The Learning Company The Learning Company (TLC) was an American educational software company founded in 1980 in Palo Alto, California and headquartered in Fremont, California. The company produced a grade-based line of learning software, edutainment games, and ...

's '' The American Girls Premiere'' (1997), which the newspaper considered to be a mere repackaging of the MECC video game. While ''The American Girls Premiere'' offered players the ability to record their own voices, ''Star Tribune'' otherwise considered it to be redundant to the earlier game, and thought ''Opening Night''s fans would find the newer title unnecessary. ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'' thought the game would only appeal to fully-fledged theatre enthusiasts, while turning off more casual creative types. ''Macs For Teachers'' described the product as "very cool". William T. Yates of ''The School House Review'' and ''World Village'' gave the game 5 out of 5 stars, commenting that the game would increase players' interest in and love of the theatre. Anne Bubnic of ''Pep Holiday Hits'' thought the game was for "aspiring actors and actresses", and chose it as one of the best picks for the holiday season. ''Gamervescent'', for which ''Opening Night'' was their first video game, wrote retrospectively that over time they learnt that the title unleashed the "greatest unintentional hilarity of all time". ''Theatre in Cyberspace'' wrote that the game was elegant and that it could be more directly applied to the classroom. A series of plays from the game have been uploaded to YouTube.

References

External links