Mario's Early Years: Fun With Letters (SNES) Playthrough
103A playthrough of The Software Toolworks' 1994 edutainment game for the Super Nintendo, Mario's Early Years: Fun With Letters.
For "ages toddler to 6," Fun With Letters was part of The Software Toolworks "Mario's Early Years" line, a trio of PC titles (and SNES ports) that aimed to teach preschoolers foundational skills. Fun With Letters features seven activities that focus on the basics of English phonics, spelling, and syntax.
Kids can choose to play as Mario, Princess Toadstool, or Yoshi, and each activity involves clicking on things to hear explanations, answer questions, and trigger animations. Everything is fully voiced, so no literacy skills are necessary to get started.
There's no core game - the Mario's Early Year games are the Super Nintendo equivalents of LeapFrog books - but I imagine that some 1994 munchkins had fun learning something with this cartridge. The graphics are nice (though a lot of the character art is a bit off-model), and the sheer number of digitized speech samples (however awkwardly spliced) would have made it a novelty.
My favorite part is at 13:29.
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