Aliens in Our Food (found educational game; 1999-2002)

The interavtive game's logo.

Status: Found

Date found: 06 Jul 2023

This article has been tagged as Needing work due to its lack of concrete references.

Aliens In Our Food is both an educational game and a website developed by Education and Youth Interactive Media and published by The Health Education Authority and funded by the European Union. It was released both as a website on the "Food Hygiene mission control" and as an interactive game on October 26th, 1999 as a standalone CD-ROM and bundled in an "interactive teaching pack" for schools to buy.

The website version has not a lot of content. It shows facts about bacteria with a little quiz to see how much you have learnt.

Gameplay (interactive game version)

The game is a point and click adventure (with a few top down movement gameplay) that teaches the importance of food hygiene and how to avoid food poisoning starring with an alien named Doof and a robot named Mic-Robe. Doof has been recently eating food with unsafe hygiene conditions resulting to Doof not feeling well. It is your task to find out the problems that Doof encountered and make a sandwich by following hygiene rules. First you start shopping and collect a list of items for your sandwich, analyse how clean Doof is, and prepare your ingredients and the workspace to then make that sandwich.

Availability

Aliens in our Food was both released as a website and an interactive game both in stand-alone form and bundled in an "interactive teahcing pack". Both being published at October 26th 1999. Aliens in our Food was targeted for the UK and for children aged 11 to 14. When The Health Education Authority (the publisher) had defunct at March 1st 2000, The rights to Aliens in our Food had now gone to Food Standards Agency. In very late 2002, The website was shut down and the game along with the "interactive teaching pack" were no longer sold.. The interactive game version cannot be purchased anymore but the website version was then archived into the Food Standards Agency's website until the archive was defunct in late 2013.

Discovery

On July 6th 2023, Internet Archive user KoopTheKoopa had found the software of the game "hidden" somewhere in a school computer, The interactive game seemed to be installed in September 19th, 2002 to that computer implying that this was bought when Food Standards Agency owned the rights to Aliens in Our Food. Nonetheless, the game was dumped and was uploaded in October 7th, 2023 on The Internet Archive.

On December 25th 2023, The website has been founed in the Internet Web Archive. The next day before the website was found, Posters of Aliens in our Food were found in the website files.