Growing up you wouldn’t catch me dead with anything pink. Pink meant girly, and girly—I was convinced—meant weak. From a young age, I insisted on jeering at anything soft or sparkly. It only got worse when I started gravitating toward stereotypical male-coded hobbies, namely video games, which brought so-called “girl games” onto my radar of things to despise. Except for one: the Easy-Bake Kitchen CD-ROM Playset. Hasbro released it in 1999 and it blew my fucking mind.
The late ‘90s and early 2000s were practically the golden age of funky children’s gadgets and this bizarre amalgam of a traditional physical playset and PC game stands testament to that. You play the game by interacting with a plastic, miniature kitchen that you strap over your keyboard. Looking back, it’s embarrassingly low-tech for how much it impressed me as a kid. Physically opening the oven or using the blender pushes out a plastic piece on the bottom of the contraption that strikes a particular key, triggering the corresponding action in-game. All its nauseatingly cutesy green-and-purple packaging does is disguise the fact that you’re really just playing by hitting keys like you would in any PC game.
As far as 7-year-old Alyse was concerned it operated on pure magic.
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