Care Bears

Summary

The game concept in Care Bears revolves around grabbing the "Tummy Icon" from each of the Care Bears as they slowly fell down the screen. Once all the icons were collected the player would have to arrange them in a certain order before time ran out. Although this may sound rather easy, one has to keep in mind that the game was geared toward young children, so things had to be kept simplistic. Care Bears made it to the beta testing stage before the marketing department decided to stop work on the game citing that the market for childrens games was diminishing, and the gameplay was too dull. Therefore it was decided that all further development on the game was to be stopped. According to programmer Laura Nikolich, part of the reason Care Bears was killed off, was that the marketing department really didn't know what they wanted. The Care Bears product line was aimed at the 8 and under age group, but marketing wanted a more action oriented game designed for older kids. Although Nikolich described the game as being almost finished, the only known prototype to surface is nothing more than a graphics demo.