...and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel

Apologies if you've seen this before, but previously the date was wrong, so...

Ask me to talk about Maxis and my memories of their products, and I will. The great games, catalogs and manuals in the early days, along with early SC2K cities were fun...but then, inevitably, things got a little sketchy there with 1996-1997, yet since none of those games produced in the lost era (read this for the full story) nothing really "touched" me, with the exception of SimSafari (NOT fun), and even that (and SimTown) were post-acquisition shovelware (I remember getting SimTown in the late 1990s at Sam's Club...I wonder how that got there....;o;)

But other companies, like Brøderbund, continue to elude me. Our focus is on Cyan (Worlds), more specifically, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel. I won't explain the plot of Cosmic Osmo, but basically you explore around a cartoon-like universe and click on everything. It's kind of for kids, but no one should feel embarrassed by it.

Prior to my "rediscovery" of Cosmic Osmo, trying to remember Osmo was like a bad drug trip (in fact, Osmo has been likened to mind-altering substances. After piecing together some facts, I discovered a few things.

1. The first versions were HyperCard stacks with an overlay plug-in that let it play Director videos. Unfortunately, this didn't work past System 6. It was also published through Activision.
2. The later versions were made by Cyan and were directly Director-made products. Activision was going through some...financial problems.
3. There were two versions of the game made: Cosmic Osmo and Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel. The "Beyond the Mackerel" version was made post-Activision. The CD-ROM (big deal in 1990) version featured additional planets (three extras, making seven). Obviously, I never had the CD-ROM version: CD-ROM drives were expensive (and slow) in the early 1990s.
4. Curiously, I remember a website that my brother printed out for me that showed Osmo-like characters in a strange world with a TV station and an observatory and I think a professor...except they were in full color! I tried looking for the scenes but I couldn't find them until...
5. I find Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel at Macintosh Garden. All is awesome again.

So, then, where is color Cosmic Osmo? An abysmal "sequel" that made Osmo profoundly ugly and in a bland puzzle environment was released a few years ago...

I found this one picture which looks quite different than the pictures I remember seeing, this one looks like they just took a snapshot and colored it in...

...and we found this segment on a comment list somewhere recently...
There was a time when Cyan released DVDs of both Cosmic Osmo and The Manhole. When I bought them, in the late 90s, a nice lady at Cyan told me they were slowly working on a color version of Cosmic Osmo. I wish...
posted by thejoshu at 9:37 AM on November 3, 2005

Do you remember any real snapshots of a color Cosmic Osmo? Write in comments, below...