MECC

MECC logo.

MECC, short for Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (later Corporation), was a computer education organization based out of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota which existed from 1971 to 1999. It's initial goal was to provide computer services and software to schools in Minnesota, but it found national popularity with it's Trail series of edutainment video games.

In the 1960s, Minnesota was home to large offices for several major computer companies causing the state's schools to be early adopters of using computers for education. This caused the state to create MECC in an effort to better facilitate this process. The company was quite successful on 8-bit computers and published about one hundred titles, but felt it needed more capital to compete on the next generation of computers as players were expecting more polished products. The state spinning MECC off into a private company in 1991 and it generated plenty of capital to make more impressive games, but it continued to publish software for the practically non-existent Apple II market until 1994. In 1995, MECC was purchased by SoftKey. SoftKey also bought The Learning Company that same year and changed their name to it. Expecting to be bought themselves, they shut down all of MECC's projects in 1997 and were bought by Mattel in 1998.

Personal

Although I didn't really care who made the games I played when I was a kid, in elementary school, I played several Commodore 64 MECC games. Later, in my teens, I played a couple other MECC titles. It wasn't until I was an adult and started researching the games I played in my youth that I noticed several were all made by the same company.