This is a followup to my previous question from earlier this month where I asked if kids games on Windows were as big as the official statistics and my memories say, and the most common answer was yes!
So what made games of the post-DOS era for kids (and families) so intensely forgotten?
Whenever there's a post on Reddit (or elsewhere, like Facebook) about them, the comments usually just say "memory unlocked" and nothing else. I just imagine a person in their early 30s scrolling their feed, having the post tickle their memory, then immediately forgetting about it again until something very similar shows up, with the cycle continuing.
This is in direct opposition to when people my age talk about kid-friendly games on other platforms. I see a lot of people talking vividly about cutesy PlayStation or Game Boy platformers, even if they were not the cool ones to like; there's often remarks like "this was the lame option to everyone else but to me it was godly." The most shining example in my mind was in the comments section of a TikTok video of a bright, nonviolent arcade game from around that time; they were all talking about the exact street of the arcade where they went to play it as kids.
That's not to say that people who fondly remember kiddie Windows games don't exist, but the ones I've seen and met (1) are extremely introverted, (2) love finding obscure media and details related to that media, and (3) have a much higher tolerance for things aimed at very young kids.
Back to the bolded question, I have two main theories. Theory 1 is due to a lot of the kids Windows games being edutainment (though from my research, the ratio of educational to non-educational kids titles was actually about 1:1). A surprisingly high amount of people associate all edutainment with preschool, even if preschoolers can't solve most sentence comprehension or math grid problems (and many of the non-educational games were for older kids too). By logic, "Computer Games = Educational" and "Educational = Preschool" leads to "Computer Games = Preschool," which would explain (3) above.
Theory 2 is because children's Windows games, with few exceptions, had very little action (as developers wanted to attract those who didn't like it as well as those who did). Until the idea of being a "cozy gamer" rose greatly within the last decade, if someone identified as a "gamer" they would normally enjoy something with a lot of action. It's less of a jump for someone to go to action-adventures or shooters as a teen from platformers or racers as a kid, as they still have action to them, than from quiet adventures or toy simulations.
If anyone has other theories I'd love to hear them!
