Whatever Happened to the
Busy People of Hamsterland?

I first experienced the wonders of Hamsterland thanks to a cover CD from the Autumn 1996 issue of a Paragon Publishing PC magazine. Thanks to the demo disc's memorable name Edutainment Gold, I managed to discover that it had actually been uploaded to the Internet Archive. However, the entry does not link to the accompanying magazine, nor does the artwork reference the name of the magazine, which may have helped me to find out more. The game is also not referred to by the full title - but simply Hamsterland. With other playable demos like Blinky Bill and Adiboo, this became my favourite demo CD to play from, yet I never again saw a mention of Hamsterland during my childhood.

A YouTube video of Hamsterland gameplay was uploaded in 2011 and received several thousand views. A high level of interest in the game could be seen in the comments, but the source was never shared.

In fact, the game itself seemed to be lost.

This was until just over a year ago, when a Chilean Reddit user called out for some unlikely assistance in the r/Denmark subreddit. In the post, titled 'Lost educational PC game found on Danish bibliotek', he explained that edutainment software had been hard to come by in Chile. Hamsterland, having been created there, was therefore a popular and well-loved title. Yet somehow the game had seemed to become entirely elusive, even in South America. Having discovered online that a physical copy of Busy People of Hamsterland was recorded as being in one Danish library, he asked if somebody nearby Hillerød could possibly visit, check the CD was actually there, and if so - loan it out, and upload the contents to the Internet Archive for the community. Unlimited, the company that produced the game had since folded, so no copyright issues were apparent, meaning the game was likely abandonware. He posted this request on 7th December 2018 and miraculously, just nine days later, another Reddit user had seemingly completed this task and Hamsterland was uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Why are we talking about this game? Because it’s a fantastic story of computing history being collectively preserved by the community.

History of Hamsterland

Part of Unlimited's website as it appeared in April 1997

Apparent retail copies of Hamsterland seen in the news feature

I found the following company information thanks to a video of a local news feature on Unlimited on YouTube. This was uploaded from a VHS home recording by Tobias Lohse, who worked for Unlimited at the time. The video is in Spanish and we have translated this to English. It appears to show physical retail copies of the game (see right). The news feature also displayed a URL for their website which is now defunct, but meant that I could access several captures of their website via the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine.

According to their website as it was in April 1997, Unlimited were founded in Chile in 1994, and partnered with BMG Interactive as publishers in 1995. Unlimited also claimed to be the first Latin American company to place a CD-ROM title in the international distribution circuit. They pride themselves on much of their software being bilingual. This looks to have been 22 titles in total, all educational in nature. Their company philosophy was "we strive to develop titles that kids love and parents value".

Busy People of Hamsterland was released in 1995. This game is also known as simply Hamsterland, or Hamsterland 1. Due to the number of languages in which this was produced, the full title can vary in meaning, sometimes translated as Full Speed in Hamsterland, or Active World of Hamsterland. This game is in fact the first in a series of three ‘Hamsterland’ games, with the following two being history-oriented ‘Time Machine’ games known as Hamsterland 2: From Prehistory to Ancient Rome & Hamsterland 3: From the Mayans to the Middle Ages. The website states that their software was available for Windows and Mac, and offers support for Windows, Macintosh, and PowerPC. Other titles released by Unlimited include Abrapalabra, KinderKit, and Amazing Inventions.

Note that the version preserved on the Internet Archive thanks to the above story is the English/Danish version. The English/Swedish version is also available on Macintosh Garden. However, the surely more common English/Spanish version is still yet to be unearthed. There is also certainly an English/Portuguese variant, and surely many more - their website stated it was released in 9 languages.

There is so much more to video game preservation than just digital preservation, and this is what we endeavour to do at the Centre with our 13,000 strong video game collection.

If you have any more information or anything to contribute to this story, please contact us by emailing collection@computinghistory.org.uk.

Special thanks to Sergio Gómez, Alfonso Gómez Morales, and Tobias Lohse for providing me with the information about Hamsterland and distribution. Thanks also to my friend Ana for aiding me with translating some information from Spanish.

Katrina Bowen, Design & Communication Officer