The Forgotten Video Game About Slavery

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Just a heads up before we begin: this episode contains some adult language.

When Julian Lucas, now a staff writer at the New Yorker, was just a kid, he became fascinated by video games.

I had plenty of late-night sleepovers playing Super Smash Bros.

Melee.

It was the late 90s, early 2000s, and he played all different kinds of games.

Fighting games and computer games, educational games, racing games, and first-person shooter games.

But there was one kind he liked most of all.

Models of the world.

Whether it was space exploration or conquering the Roman Empire or building an ancient Chinese city, something that felt like I had an entire world contained on my computer that I could improvise on and modify and control.

That's what really appealed to me.

But when Julian got to college, he started thinking more critically about this medium he loved.

At a certain point, I realized that so many of these games touched on histories that should have included slavery and just completely omitted it.

The most egregious is probably a game, I mean, it's right there in the title.

It's Sidmir's Colonization.

It was first released in 1991, and in it you play a European settler building colonies in North America and the Caribbean.

Actually, when you go to build a sugar plantation, the little icon for the character that goes and builds it is a white woman.

She looks like a pilgrim or something.

And if you go to cultivate tobacco, it's like a guy with a pitchfork and a straw hat.

In college, I really started to think about how egregious this was and thinking about the fact that I had had ancestors who were enslaved and worked on plantations.

And also just learning how central slavery had been to the coming of Western...

modernity and the world that we live in.

I thought it was just so misleading about the shape of history, which so many people learned from games like these.

He began to wonder if any games had addressed slavery.

And one of the earliest I found was called Freedom.

Freedom, which has an exclamation point at the end, is an educational software program released in the early 1990s.

In it, students play as enslaved people in the American South in 1830, trying to escape north via the Underground Railroad.

The idea was that by actually putting students in the position of runaways, it was supposed to sort of bring home a sense of the difficulty of that experience and also the importance of freedom to students.

When Julian first read about freedom, he was excited.

Here was a game that didn't whitewash history.

But immediately, that enthusiasm was tempered by the fact that I saw that this game had been the subject of a huge controversy.

This computer game was supposed to help kids study the Underground Railroad.

You are the slave.

You try to gain freedom.

Is it offensive?

So

I had been looking at this phenomenon totally from the standpoint of this is an erased history.

This is something that game designers have been too afraid to incorporate into their visions of the past.

And immediately I was confronted with sort of the opposite.

Some parents want the game banned from public schools.

Here's an example of a company that did try to include the history of slavery in a game, and it had blown up in their faces.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willip Haskin.

Teaching Black history in America has always been fraught, but in the fall of 1992, a Minnesota-based education company released Freedom Anyway.

It was the first ever American computer software to take on slavery as its subject, and it was sent to one-third of the school districts in the nation.

Less than four months later, it was pulled from the market entirely.

In this episode, we're going to look at Freedom, a well-intentioned but flawed collaboration that asks students to imagine themselves into an historical trauma and the consequences that ensued.

It's a story from 30 years ago about a past that isn't really past at all.

So, today on Decodering, how did the first video game about the Underground Railroad wind up in the dustbin of history?

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In order to understand how freedom came to be and the controversy it caused, we have to get to know the three entities most responsible for its creation.

Two men and the company they worked for and with.

A company which is best known for another game entirely.

When I was growing up, everybody would play Oregon Trail when they had free time in tech class.

Oregon Trail is a text-based educational computer game about westward expansion in which you play as a pioneer in 1848, leading a wagon group on the 2,000-plus mile track from Missouri to Oregon.

People would name the members of their wagon after classmates.

The gameplay largely involves typing.

Throughout, players are prompted with choices about how to proceed, most of which end in their death.

But that's part of the fun.

Someone would die of dysentery or typhoid or

be killed in some kind of skirmish on the way to Oregon and people would shout out, oh, you're dead to their classmate.

Oregon Trail has sold 65 million copies.

It reached Julian's classroom and thousands of others thanks to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and later corporation, or simply MEC.

MEC was founded in the early 1970s, and it was never your typical tech outfit.

It began as a nonprofit founded by a number of Minnesota's educational agencies.

It was helmed by a former high school math teacher and staffed largely by educators who together pretty much pioneered the educational computer game.

Mech made a lot of different games, including popular programs like Number Munchers, but Oregon Trail was its best-known product, going back to when it was played using mainframe computers and teletype machines.

By the early 90s, MEC was distributing its wares to the 5,000 school districts around the country that had a MEC membership.

That membership would often include an Oregon Trail-like product.

People had a shorthand for it.

It was called point-to-point simulations.

Mike PalmQuest has had a long career in educational games, including a decade at Mac.

You know, it's just like, okay, we know how that works.

It's in our DNA.

After the state of Minnesota sold Mac to a private company in the early 90s, it began to develop more of these games.

Mech made Oregon Trail 2, Yukon Trail, MayaQuest the Mystery Trail, and Amazon Trail, which Mike PalmQuest oversaw.

And they considered far more.

The way that Mac worked was a little bit like farming as opposed to industrial production.

They planted a lot of seeds.

Anybody could submit a product concept idea.

Basically, they wanted us to put in a proposal every month.

That's Rich Bergeron, a Mac employee who spoke with Julian Lucas in 2017.

So keep your mind fertile.

Keep your mind open.

Keep your mind going and working.

And let us know what you're thinking about.

What Rich, one of the two men most responsible for freedom, was thinking about was the possibility of a point-to-point simulation about the Underground Railroad.

My name is Josh Bergeron.

I'm the youngest son of Richard Bergeron, who was a designer, a historian, social studies expert at MEC.

I spoke to Josh earlier this year.

His father, Rich, died in late 2017.

If you had anything you wanted to know about knowledge, my dad was the guy.

He read

constantly and he loved teaching.

We could always connect on, hey, dad, what was the history behind anything, really?

Rich was born in the early 1940s in the Midwest.

His family was conservative, but he joined the Navy and it changed and expanded how he saw the world.

It also got him training in supercomputers.

And while in the Navy, he met a a woman from a liberal Jewish family in New York.

She already had a son with a black man who had passed away.

And Rich loved her and the idea of building a multicultural family.

And they got married.

They moved to Minnesota for a job, had two more sons, and Rich started taking American history classes at the University of Minnesota.

And after a couple of classes, it dawned on me that they're not teaching our history.

Rich was white.

When he says the American history classes weren't teaching our history, he means they were glossing over uncomfortable but true elements of the American past.

But there were new departments in African American and Native American studies that he found to be much more thorough.

Rich would go on to get his degree in history and Native Studies.

My parents, along with being interested in Native American culture and heritage, were really interested in just social justice issues.

It wasn't enough to just give money and they did and they didn't have a lot of money and they still gave money to organizations.

but then they also went out and volunteered by the late 1980s rich and his family were part of a service-minded multiracial community in the twin cities and then he got hired by mac

it was like this fantasy that came true for him

he like was just

bent over backwards at how cool it was and how it employed like all of his skill sets and interests At first he consulted on Oregon Trail 2 and its presentation of Native Americans.

He made a game called Bluegrass Bluff, in which the player excavates a Native American archaeological site.

And as Rich got comfortable at MAC, he pitched a project inspired by a man he'd met while volunteering for Minneapolis's annual Juneteenth celebration.

The man's name was Kamau Kambui.

He is the other person most responsible for freedom, and he was already running a real-life outdoor Underground Railroad reenactment in the Twin Cities.

Years before the Civil War, hundreds of slaves made their way to freedom in the North through a secret network called the Underground Railroad.

A Twin Cities man believes the lessons of the Underground Railroad are just as relevant today as they were generations ago.

Chairs in a circle so that we can begin our program tonight.

That's Kamau Kambui being featured on a local Minneapolis TV station in the early 1990s.

A dozen kids from St.

Paul are about to embark on a cultural lesson Kamau has already shared with thousands of others.

You can read in a book what it feels like.

You can see on a video.

But tonight you have the opportunity to feel the Underground Railroad.

Kamau Kambui would lead teenagers in the dead of night on a journey from station to station through woods, mud, and other hazards.

The students would get assistance, advice, and medicine from reenactors playing Quakers, Native Americans, and Harriet Tubman herself, all while being pursued by other reenactors acting as slave catchers with guns and chains and dogs.

And then in the distance, they hear a word that has never held more meaning.

Freedom this word.

Freedom this word.

It is now two o'clock in the morning.

They are tired and shoeless

and free.

He didn't do anything small.

Kamau died in 1998, but five of his seven children got on a Zoom call with me recently to talk about their father.

I know it's a common thing now, but our dad was the inventor of dad jokes.

He told the corniest jokes you ever heard.

He didn't swear.

He would say words like, he would say doodly squat.

Kamal Kambui was born Oliver Taylor in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was also raised.

His children describe him as a born educator and font of knowledge with two bachelor's degrees, who was commanding, meticulous, and charming.

He was an expert with roller skates and weapons and so beloved by the community, his sons would get jealous of all the other kids who called him dad.

He was the kind of outdoorsman who would pull the car over to give his kids a lesson on the various uses of cattails.

And from a very young age, he felt a connection to the Underground Railroad.

He had a dream when he was, I don't know, really young.

It might have been even 12.

That's Yamro Kambui Fields, Kamau's second oldest son.

And in that dream, Harriet Tubman actually came to him and asked him to help her save her people.

This dream was just one of the things that pushed him to immerse himself in Black history and the history of slavery and the African diaspora.

As a student at the University of Michigan, during the upheavals of the 60s and 70s, he became involved in Black nationalism.

He joined an organization called the Republic of New Africa, which was an offshoot of Malcolm X's followers, one of the many groups that formed after his death.

Julian Lucas, the New Yorker staff writer whose fascination with freedom led him to Kamau Cambui.

And what distinguished the Republic of New Africa from the other black nationalist groups is that they wanted to create a separate black nation in the deep south.

In 1971, Kamau left college and moved to Mississippi to join the movement.

There was a kind of libertarian streak to it, almost like a, you know, definitely a Second Amendment streak to it.

Like these were like black gun owners who wanted to become farmers and self-sufficient and secede from the United States.

It obviously didn't go well.

They were harassed by the FBI and state and local government.

Kamau was arrested for licensing a gun under his not-yet legal name and spent time in jail.

When he got out, he moved to Minnesota.

He trained with Outward Bound, which takes young people into the wilderness to teach them self-sufficiency.

He also continued to learn about the Underground Railroad.

Kamau's daughter Mausi recalls going with her father to an Underground Railroad safe house with a trap door in the floor.

And he had us get in the trap space and be closed in.

So he wanted to feel what it was like and he wanted to feel it too.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, he began leading black teenagers on the reenactments you heard earlier.

Quickly, the program expanded to include children of all races.

It was admired as an important homegrown piece of multicultural education, and Kamau was esteemed and celebrated by local media as in this segment from Minnesota Public Radio.

The reenactments could be elaborate and would change from night to night.

They inspired strong and varied feelings, including distress and fear.

But the group always reached freedom eventually.

And before and after, there would be conversation, explanation, and debrief about what had happened and why the experience was meaningful.

I think that what develops as a result of that fear and conquering that fear is to have an appreciation of what ancestors have done for us.

And

that's people of every ethnic background.

In the years to come, with no credit going to Kamau, these reenactments would spread around the country, not without controversy.

In non-expert hands, they can go really wrong.

But in Kamau's hands, they became a fixture of the Twin Cities community and part of its annual Juneteen celebration.

And that's how Kamau Kambui met Rich Bergeron, the history buff who worked at MEC.

Rich admired Kamau and his work, and he started to wonder if the live reenactment might not translate into one of the digital reenactments that were already Mech's most popular products.

So Rich submitted a proposal for a point-to-point simulation about the Underground Railroad, and it was approved.

He immediately approached Kamau about consulting, and Kamau was eager to participate.

His daughter, Nayamka.

We remember him telling us that it was going to be a game changer.

It was very exciting.

And so Kamau and Rich eagerly embarked upon a project they believed was going to make a difference.

A project that would soon prove to be even more complicated than they could imagine.

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Work began on Freedom around late 1991.

So far, I've been referring to it and the products like it as games.

But the people making these products did not see them that way.

They always called it an educational simulation.

They really rejected the term game.

I will probably never refer to it as a game.

It was really intended as a simulation.

We never ever called these these games.

This was the early 1990s, though.

Video games were widely understood at best to be something kids did on a home console system where they played as an Italian plumber or worse, as a moral scourge encouraging violence.

Even Mech's other simulations, like Oregon Trail, were often used as recreational entertainment by children goofing around during computer lab.

Few people viewed video games as serious educational or artistic endeavors.

But that's exactly what the Freedom team wanted to prove they could be.

It felt like we were doing something new.

John O'Jannon was one of the junior programmers on the team Mech assembled to make Freedom and the only one who was willing to speak with me on the record.

Rich was extremely enthusiastic about his project.

He just was infectious about these kinds of things.

And Kamau, who gave us a lot of the ideas, was infectious about it as well.

The MEC team consisted of five members.

Rich Bergeron was lead designer, and he was joined by three programmers and one illustrator.

All of them were white.

Minnesota at the time was a very white state, and MEC was a very white company.

It employed about 200 people, and only a handful of them were black.

Kamau was the simulations consultant, referred to in the credits as a naturalist and African-American historian who enabled the detail and accuracy of the project.

The team wanted to create an experience like Kamau's live reenactments.

They wanted to give participants a brief window into the feelings, the stress, disorientation, and danger of being an enslaved runaway.

That was one of the points they wanted to get across: it was

really hard to escape.

To give a sense that this is not something that was really a game at all.

It was a struggle.

It was a dangerous undertaking.

And they had to convey this intense experience on an Apple II.

Using an Apple II is very easy.

The only hard part is getting your kid away from it.

An Apple II is a squat beige brick of a computer as wide as it is deep with a nine-inch screen.

Thanks largely to an early contract Mech made with Apple in the late 1970s, these computers were dominant in schools all over the country.

And it's the system for which Freedom was designed.

By the early 1990s, it was no longer cutting edge, and the graphics in particular were primitive.

First of all, you only have 16 colors.

You can only use eight at a time.

So depicting race is super problematic.

Mike Palmquist, a former Mech employee you heard from earlier, was a member of the social studies curriculum team and sat in and advised in some of the meetings where freedom was approved.

And number two is there wasn't any audio.

So all of the narration, all of the dialogue was written out as displayed text.

The team tried to overcome these limitations as best they could.

Everything about the gameplay, where you would go, who you would meet, what you would do, was undergirded by research.

Rich also arranged for the team and some sales reps to go on one of Kamau's reenactments to understand what they were trying to create.

And he corresponded with academic historians as well.

But Kamau Kambui was the principal consultant, and he had thoughts on how to address some of these issues.

Julian Lucas, again.

He had really specific ideas about what was important in the history of the Underground Railroad that were shaped by his life experience as a black nationalist.

People at Mech say this was relevant with regard to two aspects of the simulation in particular.

In their retelling, it was important for the characters in the game to speak in the way that Black people in the South would have spoken at that time and to have defined African features.

And for him, this was

race pride.

Enslaved people making their way to freedom had done this extremely difficult thing, and they had done it as themselves, as Africans and the descendants of Africans.

Kamal thought all of this ought to be celebrated and embraced.

That included by using an approximation of 19th century black speech, a dialect which was used for the written dialogue of the enslaved characters within freedom.

It was a striking choice that would go on to attract a lot of attention, but it wasn't the only notable aspect of the simulation.

So in freedom, you start out on a plantation.

That plantation could be in Delaware, Maryland, or Virginia.

The character could be a man or a woman, and they would have some randomly generated qualities.

Like some avatars might come with a compass, some could read, and others could not.

If your avatar was illiterate, an indecipherable glyph font would be used for place names within the simulation.

The first thing you do is speak to

other enslaved people on the plantation, elders in the community of the enslaved, gives you something, whether it's a piece of advice or an object that's going to help you on your journey.

Immediately, you're in a kind of wilderness.

You have to navigate by using the stars and by using moss on trees and seeing where the Big Dipper is.

And as you move through the map of the game, you encounter all kinds of obstacles.

You have to cross rivers.

You might enter a town and you have to make a decision about are they going to be someone who's sympathetic or are they going to call the patrollers and send me back to slavery?

You hunt and fish and periodically you encounter slave patrols and you have to confront them, run away from them, attempt to hide.

You can also

try to fight them.

The first time Julian, who is an experienced gamer, sat down to try freedom, it took him seven tries and two hours to succeed.

Far more time than most students would ever have in a computer lab in one sitting.

By the summer of 1992, Freedom was ready to be playtested on actual students in grades five through nine and by their teachers too.

Freedom came with a 60-plus page user manual that contained instructions for the simulation, a multi-page historical primer, and a bibliography that referenced more than 70 sources.

Teachers following the manual were instructed to address potentially controversial and confusing aspects of the game with their students beforehand, including things like the simulation's dialect.

Rich Bergeron also informally tested Freedom on additional black educators and academics.

One college history professor he invited to review it wrote back: Is that the one Kamau Kambui is doing?

If it's all right for Kamau, it's all right for me.

I don't need to see it.

Rich himself told a St.

Paul paper he was expecting different reactions from different racial groups, elaborating that some white people don't want to be reminded of how their ancestors treated black people.

Quote, they would rather gloss over it than talk about it.

Around October 1992, MEC began releasing freedom to the one-third of school districts in the country that had a MEC membership.

There were so many puzzle pieces that came together.

Josh Bergeron, Rich Bergeron's son.

They got support from the organization.

The team was put together.

I think they really truly felt with the curriculum, all of this was going to make a difference.

He really wanted it to be larger than life.

Yamro Fields, Kamau Kambui's son.

This was his, you know, part of, anyway, his, his legacy.

This is something that he wanted to, you know, hand down for his grandchildren.

In the weeks after Freedom's release, things seemed to be going well.

Rich told Julie and Lucas the team received a letter from a Catholic school in Alabama.

The teachers had been looking through the manual, planning to write and complain about the topic, but had found the whole instructional packet so well put together, they decided instead to use Freedom in their curriculum.

A capsule review in a software catalog called Freedom one of the hottest new Apple II titles on the market and said it does a quote impressive job in spite of the medium's limitations.

In November of 1992, Mech made Freedom the complimentary program at its annual conference, free to anybody who wanted a copy.

And yet things were not going quite as smoothly as all the public accolades made it seem, even at that annual Mech conference, as Rich explained to Julian Lucas.

We had generally

a pretty welcoming attitude that we saw from teachers, from black folks.

We had one man,

he came in and he watched for a while and then he started screaming and shouting about it.

This is absolutely horrifying.

I'm going to do my best to pull this off the market.

Around the same time, an email chain was forwarded to Mac from a group of black computer programmers, horrified by the very premise, comparing it to making a game about the Holocaust or Jeffrey Dahmer.

A black teacher in Texas wrote in asking for the game to be pulled, and she was not dissuaded by a response assuring her that a black man had been a key advisor on the project.

The Freedom team began to work on an updated version of the simulation with better graphics and sound, hoping to address some of these concerns.

But before they could, Freedom reached a school in Indiana.

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Hello there.

Hi, this is Will of Haskin.

I was returning your call again.

Yes.

Hey, Willa.

Thanks so much for calling me back.

I really appreciate it.

Can you imagine my

shock of your text message?

That's Darilyn Sharp.

I'd cold texted her after coming across her name in a news article about freedom.

She was born and raised in Gary, Indiana.

And when she was just a little girl in the 1960s, it was a booming steel town.

Her family was affluent, politically-minded, and well-connected.

Darilyn became one of the first black loan officers in the area, underwriting mortgages for black homebuyers who had been historically discriminated against.

I tried to make a difference.

I had to make a difference, you know, and letting my clients know, look, you can buy any house.

If I qualify you and say you're approved, you can buy any house.

We didn't have to stay in this red line district.

Gary, even more than other cities across the country, got hollowed out by white flight, urban decay, and manufacturing decline.

By the 1980s, 1980s, the city was well on its way to losing half of its population, including to suburbs like Merrillville, Indiana, which abuts Gary directly to the south.

We moved from Gary to Merrillville.

I moved in search of a better school system for the kids.

It was a predominantly white school district with an increasing number of black students, and it was tense.

They would do things like trail our kids home to make sure that they lived in the

school district.

Literally.

Daryln was brought in soon after her son transferred and told he should be held back, an experience that other black families also went through.

A team coach didn't want his players having cornrows or braids in their hair.

There was no black history taught and very few black teachers.

It was a clear racial divide.

It was very clear.

It was very obvious.

And then one night in very early 1993, her family was sitting around the dinner table when her son Byron, who was 11 years old at the time, started peppering his older sister with questions.

He and his sister are talking and he's saying, what kind of game is it that you can't win and

dogs is chasing you and they got a noose on a tree to hang you.

And if you go into the swamps, the dogs can find you and chase you out.

And all of a sudden, what are you talking about?

And he said, this is a game that i'm playing at school what kind of game is this

and he said it's some freedom game we had computer time and they let us play it i reached daryl and son byron sharp on the phone when he was at work after like my second time playing it i'm like this ain't right what what about it in particular like made you know that the choices that you had to make like you had to make split decision choices.

They would be like run up a tree or like hide yourself in the swamp.

Either way you picked, you still getting caught.

What about that seemed like so fucked up?

Excuse my language.

You got to understand you eight, nine years old and you realize that your ancestors was caught.

As a kid, Byron knew about slavery.

This was a topic and history that was discussed in his household.

That's actually part of the reason he brought it up at dinner.

Something about it seemed off compared to what he already knew.

So you telling me I can make this decision and

go to jail or fuck my shit up for the rest of my life.

Either way it went, he was going down and some people were going through that down.

In the live reenactments led by Kamau Kambui, the participants always reached freedom.

The journey could be harrowing and scary and hard, but the participants succeeded and in so doing were supposed to appreciate themselves and the much harder experience of as Kamau put it, their ancestors.

But in freedom, the simulation, you didn't always succeed.

In fact, you failed most of the time.

And it wasn't the meaningless dying of Super Mario Brothers or even Oregon Trail.

Instead, you get turned in, killed, returned to slavery.

As Byron and I talked, it became clear that the problem wasn't that the simulation was trying to teach this gruesome and difficult and important history, a history he and his mother want to be taught.

It's that it didn't even then feel like it was about history.

It felt like a hopeless metaphor for how his school, how his country saw his future.

Hell yeah, it was real life.

It's why 30 years later, this experience dropped on him when he was just 11 years old in the middle of computer class is still so vivid.

That's why we had to do something about it because I could not believe that they were introducing those kinds of feelings.

Darilyn knew what she had to do.

I went to the school the very next day.

Don't hesitate.

She was on the PTA and she knew the principal who assured her it was just part of the curriculum.

But Darilyn asked to see it for herself.

And it was as Byron described.

And I'm like, you're not going to play this game anymore.

My kid is not.

No, you're not playing this game at this school anymore.

And so then from that point, I just started rallying.

She started reaching out to the other black parents who were hearing from their own kids about freedom.

Some third and fourth graders, unsupervised in the computer lab, had even been teased by older white boys.

The older boys had made fun of the dialect in freedom and referred to the rudimentary images as Aunt Jemima's.

The boys had gone home in tears.

None of these parents knew about Mac or Kamao Kambui or Rich Bergeron and their ambitions or intentions.

They just knew they had to do something.

You just don't put something like that out there and expect us to be okay with it.

This is not a game.

This is not a game.

I got a telephone call from the CBS affiliate in Chicago asking for a statement.

Dean Kephart, an educator who has worked and continues to work at nonprofits, was the director of communications at Mech at the time.

And I had no idea what had transpired in Merriville.

By the time he got off the phone with the Chicago station, it was clear to him that a lot of things Mech had not foreseen had happened.

But as he talked to an advisor, he realized Mech's intentions didn't really matter.

I tested my thinking with her, and she said, Dean,

there is no win here you're going to have to swallow the mistake and apologize and pull it from the marketplace if you enter into this debate you're going to lose you're looking at two little boys who are crying and their parents are are blowing the whistle i mean that is not what you want to see on the evening news

it ended up on the news anyway in merrillville indiana some parents want the game game banned from public schools.

They find this, for example, to be offensive.

Do you have anything to help me?

You give me some advice?

I can read your action, Chile.

You gonna run?

What the newscaster is reading here is the written text that enslaved characters used in the simulation.

The same text that had also been used to make black children in the classroom cry.

And once it was out in the world, all sorts of design choices and compromises Mech had made for technology and authenticity's sake were revealed as liabilities.

The graphics may have been hamstrung by the Apple II's limitations, but they still appeared to be minstrel-like caricatures of black people.

Yes, there was a detailed manual, but teachers used to letting their students play Mech's other games without supervision did all use it.

The difficulty of the simulation, without instruction and in the context of America's vast racial tensions, wasn't creatively disorienting or inspiring.

It was dispiriting and maybe pointless.

Mech wanted to push the boundaries of educational software, but their ambition alone couldn't overcome adult skepticism about the triviality of video games.

And a nearly all-white company couldn't expect the input of one black consultant, however well-informed and impassioned, to stand in for the perspectives and experiences of millions of black students and parents.

And that same company had no moral authority to stick up for the product, to say, we'll try to make it better, when black parents complained.

And so just hours after being approached for a comment, Dean Kephart made a decision, releasing a statement to the media.

I just said our intent was not to hurt children and ask that all copies be either destroyed or sent back.

The incident in Merrillville spread to schools and newspapers and radio stations across the country.

Just the idea of it was galling.

Parents described it as a disgrace that Nintendoized the most serious of histories.

The abrupt downfall of the product sent those who had worked on it and had such high hopes for it reeling.

It was traumatic for a lot of people.

There was a little bit of mourning and a little bit of, you know,

not guilt, but, you know,

responsibility.

It was very deflating.

They had just worked so hard on this and tried to be so thorough and careful about it.

It was definitely something that he was quite disappointed in.

The controversy around Freedom took some time to die down, though the company's swift decision to halt the game did help contain it.

In 1995, a copy of Freedom that had not been destroyed was used in an Arizona computer classroom, again to harass and humiliate a black student whose parents sued the school district.

That same year, Mech would be sold to a larger software company, the first in a number of sales that would result just a few years later in MEC's closure.

Josh Bergeron says that making freedom and working at Mac was the pinnacle of his father, Rich's career.

After the company folded, Rich floated for a long time, trying to find work he found as meaningful.

We as a family

definitely had this residual of like, what if?

What if that had been successful?

Rich Bergeron himself told Julian Lucas that if he could do it all over again, he would have waited a few years for the technology that was about to be available with 256 colors, photography, and sounds, technology that Mech integrated into its future trail products.

As for Kamau Kambui, according to his children, even after Freedom was pulled, he tried to repackage it, change its name, update its software, and get it placed in stores.

His daughter, Nayamka.

Even until his death, it was still on his mind to reintroduce it, you know, give it a new face, and he just ran out of time.

He just ran out of time.

Kamau Kambui died when he was only 50.

You can still participate in his Underground Railroad reenactment in Minnesota, where they are now run by the Kamau Kambui Circle for Cultural Learning.

In the 30 years since Freedom's release, the people who worked on and around it have had a lot of time to think about it.

Some still believe Freedom could have done a lot of good if it had had been given the support to iterate and improve.

Others have come to think of it as impossibly flawed.

Some are proud of it.

Some are ashamed.

Some are still too nervous to talk about it.

They do almost all agree on one thing, though.

Even an updated version would still be controversial today.

Florida schools must now teach students about the, quote, benefit of slavery when teaching Black history, the controversial new education standard.

Because teaching about slavery, about black history, about American history, in whatever medium, has only become more fraught since freedom tried and failed to do so.

It was highly, highly imperfect, yes, but

can we really say that something better has replaced it?

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written by Willa Paskin.

I produced Decodering with Katie Shepard.

This episode was also produced by Benjamin Frisch.

This episode was edited by Erica Morrison.

Derek John is executive producer, Joel Meyer is senior editor-producer, and Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.

I want to give an enormous thank you to Julian Lucas for his expertise, reporting, and generosity, without which this episode would not have been possible.

I also want to direct you to an article he wrote for The New Yorker, Can Slavery Reenactment Set Us Free, which explores more specifically the history and complicated present of the live Underground Railroad reenactments that Kamau Kambui pioneered.

I'd also like to thank Jesse Fuchs for suggesting this topic.

Thank you also to Coventry Cowans, Bridget Fielder, Bob Whitaker, Alan Wisman, Wayne Studer, Alicia Montgomery, Rebecca Onion, Luke Winkie, and the children of Kamao Kambui who spoke with me.

Yamro Kambui Fields, Halim Fields, Mawusi Kambui Pierre, Nayamka Sally, and Kamau Sababu Kambui Jr.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

And if you're a fan of the show, I'd really like you to sign up for Slate Plus.

Slate Plus members get to listen to Decoder Ring without any ads, and their support is crucial to our work.

So please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

That's it for this season.

Be well.

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