Museum Madness

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Released in 1994 by MECC, Museum Madness is an Edutainment Game involving a boy and his robot sidekick working to stop a virus infecting a museum and all of the exhibits. The kid must go from exhibit to exhibit, talking to robotic replicas of famous people, finding broken pieces of technology, and rebalancing the world's ecosystem among other things, until the virus itself is discovered and deleted.


Tropes used in Museum Madness include:


  • But Thou Must!: If you say no to the calligraphy teacher's offer to make you his student he'll just ignore you until you accept.
  • Chain of Deals: In order to make a telescope for Galileo to use, you have to master the ancient art of bartering.
  • Computer Virus: Serves as the game's Big Bad.
  • Easy Amnesia: Apparently it works on androids, too, as robo-George Washington forgets everything that led to the American Revolution when he falls off his robo-horse. It's up to you to jog his memory.
  • Edutainment Game
  • Kangaroos Represent Australia: As seen in the Simple Machines exhibit.
  • Fifteen Puzzle: The sliding variety is a puzzle in the Hall of Ecology; no surprise then that the Hall of Ecology is the longest exhibit to complete.
  • Give Me Your Inventory Item: You have to give everything in your inventory (except your save disk) to get a ticket to Ellis Island. You get it all back at the end, though.
  • Green Aesop: The most obvious example: In order to complete the Energy Technology exhibit, the world cannot have any energy created from coal, oil or nuclear power. A less severe example is the Ocean Life exhibit, which requires you to save the ocean by fixing a leaky pipe.
  • Hub Level: The Museum Atrium. Click on the map to select an exhibit to fix.
  • Luck-Based Mission: You have a one-in-three shot of getting to Ellis Island on your first try. Guess the wrong boat and you get to start the exhibit over.
  • The Maze: Three of them, actually. The Employees Only area of the museum, the library and the ferry.
  • No Name Given: The Player Character. He has his own lines and personality, unlike your typical player avatar.
  • Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony: You get to hammer in the Golden Spike connecting the Transcontinental Railroad.
  • Ridiculously-Human Robots: The CyReps. Well, at least the ones who aren't meant to look like non-human animals.
  • Robot Buddy: MICK.
  • Rube Goldberg Device: You have to build one out of simple machines.
  • Trapped in TV Land: Kinda. You are apparently capable of reaching into a television set and pulling out fully functional stack scrubbers, with no comment on why that makes no sense.