Rocky's Boots
Rocky's Boots is an educational logic puzzle game by Warren Robinett and Leslie Grimm, published by The Learning Company in 1982. It was released for the Apple II, TRS-80 Color Computer, Commodore 64, IBM PC, and the IBM PCjr. It won Software of the Year awards from Learning Magazine, Parent's Choice magazine, and InfoWorld, and received the Gold Award from the Software Publishers Association. It was one of the first educational software products for personal computers to successfully use an interactive graphical simulation as a learning environment.
A more difficult sequel was released in 1984: Robot Odyssey.
Gameplay
The object of the beginning part of Rocky's Boots is to use a mechanical boot to kick a series of objects off a conveyor belt; each object will score some number of points, possibly negative. To ensure that the boot only kicks the positive objects, the player must connect a series of logic gates to the boot.The player is represented by an orange square, and picks up devices by moving their square over them and hitting the joystick button. When the boot has kicked all of the positive objects and none of the negative objects, Rocky will appear and do a beeping dance.
Later, the player finds that they can use all of the game's objects, including AND gates, OR gates, NOT gates, and flip-flops, in an open-ended area to design one's own logic circuits and "games". The colors of orange and white are used to show the binary logic states of 1 and 0. As the circuits operate, the signals can be seen slowly propagating through the circuits, as if the electricity was liquid orange fire flowing through transparent pipes.