The Electric Company: Math Fun

Also known as: Math Fun (Re-release)

Developer: APh Technical Consulting

Mattel didn't just like licenses for their sports games. The Electric Company was a children's show that both went off the air before I was born, but also went off the air two years before this game was released. It aired on PBS for roughly six years, from 1971 to 1977. I watched the first episode to get a better understanding of what this license was exactly…and it is a very 70s experience. I'm pretty sure everyone in the first segment, including the children, were high on the drugs. Bill Cosby is in the show…and further reminds me of how disappointed I am in the fella. He was a very, very talented guy…a shame to know that he gets revealed as a bit of a scumbag later in life. Anyway, it's not an awful show for children and you can see how it would help kids learn. Much like the show, the two licensed educational games that Mattel put out using the Electric Company name are also not awful games to help children learn. The first game released was Math Fun, which actually does a pretty good job of making math fun…if you've got a friend to compete against. The concept of the game doesn't quite sound like a math game at first glance. Each player controls a gorilla on the edge of opposite ends of a river bank. The gorillas are having a race down the river, but various animals get in their way. The only way past these animals is to solve a math problem. If you solve the equation correctly, the animal blocking you with move and you'll continue on down the bank. If you answer it incorrectly, the gorilla will hop in the river to swim around the animal and get confronted by a crocodile, who will refuse to allow the gorilla back on dry land again until he can correctly answer a new problem. Since prior to the race, each player can adjust how many problems they want to answer (a maximum of 99) and the difficulty level (from 1 to 5) of the problems that they'll be dealt. Each player can have a different number of problems to solve and a different difficulty level, so it can always be an even race, even if an adult were to play this game with their new-to-math child. The end result can be a fun, frantic race between two people where you can exercise your brain while exercising your mouth with some friendly trash talk.

Review added: 11/29/2025

The Electric Company: Word Fun

Also known as: Word Fun (Re-release)

Developer: APh Technical Consulting

Making further use of the Electric Company license, after Math Fun was created, a new game was put out that may have fit the license slightly better - Word Fun. From what I can tell, The Electric Company television show was mostly aimed towards teaching children to read. That doesn't mean that they didn't cover math, but the very little of the show that I've seen was all based on reading and learning vocabulary and the first episode, which I watched on YouTube (this show was a bit before my time), had an introduction from one of the creators of the show, where she stated that the goal was to teach children how to read using a television show. Anyway, all of that out of the way, Word Fun may actually help children with spelling. There are three mini games included here, and all of them have a mild charm to them. First is Crosswords, which is basically the Intellivision version of Scrabble that you can play with a friend. The second game is Word Hunt. In this game, each player controls a monkey and there are letters all over the screen. The goal is to move your monkey over to a letter, pick it up, and bring it back to your area of the screen with the goal of spelling a word. Part of the fun in this game is that both players are on the screen at the same time…so if there's only one S on the screen, and both players need it, it's a mad dash to see which player can nab it first. After both players have spelled out three words, or after the time limit expires, the players manually go through and tell the computer if words are legitimate or not for the scoring system. While it stinks that the computer won't automatically do that for you, it also makes sense as it forces the children playing to revisit the words which may help them learn…it also means that new words like "twerk" can be used while playing and still have points applied, which may may you twerk in celebration. I know I did. The last game is Word Rockets, which is a very crude shooting game. During this game, you'll battle against a buddy. On the bottom of the screen are four vowels. You can grab these vowels and shoot them up into the sky. While you do this, you'll see an incomplete word scroll across the screen. Your goal is to shoot a vowel into that incomplete word to make it a complete word. It's a bit slow-paced, but it can be mildly fun for both players to scramble over to a vowel to try to complete the word before the other player is able to. Overall, Word Fun has a little more content than Math Fun did, but none if it really feels as fun as Math Fun did. And this is coming from someone who always loved English class and hated math class. Still, though, with a lot of educational games being as entertaining as trying to fill in a crack with sand, one grain at a time, the two Electric Company games, while not perfect, do show that educational games can also be fun.

Review added: 11/29/2025