JumpStart Explorers

JumpStart Explorers has the distinction of being the only JumpStart game to focus entirely on teaching history. To make this subject more palatable for the ages 5–8 crowd, all of the historical figures are represented by anthropomorphic animals.

If you've ever wondered what King Tut's fursona would look like, this game has the answer.

Unused Graphics#

Unused Stickers#

Graphics for an unused Egyptian sticker found in stickers.dxr. The black and white version contains a caption that says "Narmer", which is the name of an Egyptian pharaoh that this character was apparently meant to represent. However, Narmer isn't one of the historical figures featured in-game. (This makes sense, given that the Egypt location is set during the Eighteenth Dynasty whereas Narmer is from the First Dynasty.) Although these graphics go unused, several background characters in Egypt share this character design.

If there's another reason that this sticker wasn't used at all when hypothetically it could've been repurposed for one of them, it's most likely because each sticker sheet has exactly eight stickers, and since there were already eight other Egypt stickers, there simply wasn't room for it.

Placeholder Graphics#

There are multiple placeholder graphics for the tadpoles. All of these graphics appear in files for the tadpole search screens, where the player must move the mouse around the screen to find where a tadpole is hiding. The first graphic appears in nile_searchA.dxr and nile_searchB.dxr. The second graphic appears in ch_fruit_search.dxr, ch_silk_search.dxr, and ch_wagon_search.dxr. The third and fourth graphics both appear in the file per_searchA.dxr. The fifth graphic appears in per_searchB.dxr.

Cornfield Mockup#

The file cornfield.dxr contains a mockup of the minigame featuring some very low-res character sprites and an unused variation of the background.

Unused Cinematics#

In the qt folder, there is a video named credits.mov, which isn't the credits for this game, but rather for Sabrina, The Animated Series: Magical Adventure, another game published by Knowledge Adventure about a year prior.