Crosscountry BC
When I started this blog, I had ideas about games I wanted to write about—but some of those games, I couldn't write about yet, because neither I nor anyone else had them. Well, after years of searching, I've finally found one of them. Meet Crosscountry BC.
If you grew up in Canada in a certain era, there's a good chance you played Crosscountry Canada at school. Over 20 years from 1986 through 2005, this educational trucking sim was a mainstay in generations of Canadian classrooms. The Apple II version was a big hit in the elementary school computer lab when I was growing up[1]. It was exactly the right balance of educational game: educational enough that schools would buy it and put it on their computers, but game enough that kids would want to play it without being forced to.
There's one Crosscountry that most Canadians didn't play though, and that's Crosscountry BC. Released 2004 only in the province of British Columbia[2], it's not really a "crosscountry" game at all and takes place exclusively within BC. Since it was designed specifically for schools, it's scarce and obscure even within BC—a rare little oddity that local BC history buffs have been searching for fruitlessly, until now.
Crosscountry is an educational trucking game—Canuck Truck Simulator, if you will. Players take on the role of a long-haul truck driver shuttling goods around the country. In a given campaign, players are assigned a randomized selection of two or more goods to pick up along with a city to deliver them to. Every good in the game is available at only a few cities within the map, and there's no guarantee they'll be anywhere even close to each other, so it's up to the player to consult the map and decide on a route that will take them through all their stops before getting to the spot they need to drop off their cargo—all without breaking the $1000 budget they're given at the start of the game. Players navigate their route one stop at a time; every city or town is a chance to rest and refuel. And, of course, since this is an educational game the player can collect each town's photo and read up on the real-world places they've been.
It it were just about navigating routes, it might be educational but a bit dry. What makes Crosscountry work is that the player is making so many more decisions than that and being immersed in the truck driver life. The player's driver needs to eat, and sleep, but it's not enforced just by forcing the player to rest. No, it takes the much more interesting approach of giving the player consequences. Forget to sleep, or to run the windshield wipers during the rain? You have a much higher chance to get into an accident on the road. Forget to fuel up? You can use your cell phone to call for a tow or an emergency refuel, but it'll cost you. None of these are tutorialized or explained in advance, except via the manual; for most children, these are fun or unpleasant surprises. It's that sense of capricious cruelty that makes Crosscountry so much fun.
A player who does read the manual has more surprises to find, however, like instructions on how to speed—in the "minimizing expenses" section. It also, of course, helpfully notes the $50 speeding ticket and risk of getting into an accident, hoping that a player who's tempted to try it out will eventually figure out they're spending more on tickets and repairs than they're saving on other expenses. It's much funnier, though, to picture a child figuring out the ideal speeding strategy that puts them financially ahead of any of the penalties they might see. (A friend shared a story of having discovered a bug in the Apple II version to make the police disappear when they came to pull you over.) Less educational, but probably more realistic to actual trucking.
That sense of being open to playfulness and fun truly stands out to me as an adult coming back to Crosscountry even this many years after my elementary school days. It's much easier as an adult than it was as an eight-year-old; I already have the long-term planning skills the game wants me to be learning from it, so I'm not getting into accidents or forgetting to prepare for long legs of the journey. But this complexity, and the trust in the player to figure it out, helps it stand out.
It doesn't hurt that the art is so fun, too. The idiosyncratic art style mixes a very 90s style of prerendered CGI with heavily photobashed scenes—photoshopped skies, wildly unrealistic colour filtering, CGI and photography welded together. It's remarkable how much it looks like a late 90s multimedia art game at least as much as a children's game. Edutainment isn't necessarily realistic as a genre, but it is striking for a geographic game to take such a fast and loose approach to depicting the real-world cities players are travelling through. Wouldn't it be fun for Burnaby to be a corridor of iridescent cyberpunk buildings? I think so, and Crosscountry BC thinks so too. Each city is also shown via real-world photos the player earns after visiting them, often sourced from local schools or students, so players aren't at the risk of thinking these stylized scenes are real. The educational content is still there... but so is the fun stuff.
Crosscountry BC also has a few features that not all Crosscountry players might have tried. They had always been sold in two editions: a cheaper home version and a more expensive school/educator version, with the school versions including extra features targeted at teachers. The main extra feature is a scenario creator. Normally, as I described above, the game picks the commodities and dropoff location randomly. The scenario creator, though, allows the user to craft a job with exactly the details they want—they can specify the starting and ending cities and can add exactly the commodities they want. The included 100-page teacher's guide PDF provides detailed instructions to teachers on how they might use it, including how it could be incorporated into lesson plans. That said, in a world where kids have fun making levels and sharing them with each other, it's easy to imagine kids just putting together little truck routes for each other and sharing them around.
My copy is a disc in a plain white sleeve, missing any paperwork that may have come with it, so it's not immediately clear whether it's a home or school version—but it's also not clear if there was a difference this time. The installer asks if it was bought for schools or for home, but either way the game makes the extra features available. Given how limited its distribution was, it may just not have made sense to create two separate builds with fewer features, so home players finally got a taste of what teachers could do all this time.
Crosscountry BC is based on the fourth generation of Crosscountry, specifically the 2002 Crosscountry Canada 2[3] and Crosscountry USA 2. All three games share an engine and the same core gameplay; many of the essential art assets are shared between all three versions, while a number of Canada-specific art assets in Crosscountry BC are taken from Crosscountry Canada 2.
The biggest difference in Crosscountry BC, of course, is the map: Crosscountry Canada 2 takes place in the entire country, while Crosscountry BC takes place in a single province. Comparing their British Columbia maps, it's immediately clear just how abbreviated Canada 2 is—at least from a local perspective. Most of the British Columbia map in Canada 2 fits on a single screen, with a total of 13 municipalities. Looking at it with BC eyes, it's easy to spot how much is missing. Vancouver's here, of course, but neighbouring municipalities like Burnaby (one of the province's biggest!) are missing. Small towns are present when they need to be to supply goods, but major routes such as Vancouver to Prince George (a driving distance of nearly 800 kilometres, close to nine hours by road) are a single hop without any stops along the way. Crosscountry Canada 2 has the national perspective on BC, but not the local perspective. It doesn't just need more content, it needs communities!
Vancouver to Prince George provides a great example of this in a microcosm. In BC, this isn't a single hop: as seen in the screenshot above, it's a route with many stops along the way. The player has several options, thanks to the expanded road network surrounding Kamloops; a sample route could take the player from Vancouver to Princeton, Merritt, Kamloops, Williams, and Quesnel before finally landing in Prince George. Any of these are places for the player to take stock and refuel, eat, or reset, but they're not just rest stops. Each of these is a destination the player could pick up goods from, or drop off their cargo at the end of the journey. And, of course, they're little learning opportunities for the player, with their own photos and educational blurbs.
These are also chances for school children to spot themselves on the map. The credits are filled with the names of individual schools that that consulted on the game, and the names of those comunities show up in the game as destinations too. By those standards, it's not surprising to see remote communities like Atlin, or Daajing Giids[4] on Haida Gwaii. This is a game for BC school kids, so it's natural that it's also a chance for children from remote communities, used to seeing themselves passed over in other media, to see their own homes or the places their families live represented.
Given that the other Crosscountry games are long-haul trucking simulators, it's not surprising that Crosscountry BC needed a few tweaks to the game formula. A lot of the challenge of Crosscountry comes from resource usage: gas used up over long trips; hunger and exhaustion that build up over time; and the financial cost of refuelling, resting in hotels, and eating. Crosscountry's focus on realism means that these prices couldn't really be rebalanced; the cost of gas and meals are accurate to the time period, and even the lodging tax is strictly simulated for every single community. Instead, the game adjusts the player's starting budget ($1000 in Crosscountry BC, versus $10,000 for Crosscountry Canada 2) and by giving the players more frequent decisions. Communities are placed much more closely together in Crosscountry BC; this is partly just to compensate for the smaller map size, and partly because representing local communities was a large part of the game's mission. The result, though, is that players aren't travelling hundreds of kilometres in a single pass: they're making decisions several times along a route that would have been a single choice in Crosscountry Canada 2.
When I say that Crosscountry BC was aimed at local schools, it helps to contrast it with how educational games were usually developed to get an idea what this really means. It was developed by Ingenuity Works, a longtime educational game developer who are still based in Vancouver. This was the latest in a long line of Crosscountry games which they'd been selling to schools and parents. Selling an educational game isn't quite like selling a game that's going to store shelves, but it's not totally different either: the game's designed by the company, based on their own ideas and market research, and then goes out to sale to anyone who wants it. BC, meanwhile, was an explicit government partnership: it wasn't developed as a general product, but specifically for and in consultation with BC schools. (This wasn't the first time they'd tried this approach; in the Apple II era, they'd made a customized Crosscountry North Dakota for state schools[5][6].) Since it was made specifically for school boards, it wasn't sold like a normal game. While the BC Ministry of Education press release mentions that students could order a copy for home, it never appeared on Ingenuity Works's own website and certainly never appeared in stores. If it was genuinely available to buy outside of school, very few copies were ever sold this way—which is, of course, why people have spent so many years trying and failing to find it.
This explains why it's rare, of course, but it also explains why it's so specific. Even when you do your best market research, you don't always know exactly what the customer expects. But when you have exactly one customer, and that customer commissioned the game, you can give them exactly what they want. And in the case of Crosscountry BC, that's communities. As I mentioned earlier, it was developed in consultation with individual schools across the province, giving them a chance to make sure they were represented accurately and—and, also, to present themselves to their students the way they wanted to be seen. The government's checklist[7] is a cute insight into exactly what schools were providing: a photograph (indeed, many of the photos in-game come directly from teachers and students); a description of their community; the commodities it would make sense for their city to supply for the in-game economy; its terrain, for the in-game driving scenes; and so on. It's giving the customer what they want, but for a hyperlocal game it's also a chance to make sure kids get to see their communities as they think of them.
Of course, like most local art, Crosscountry BC is the most interesting to people to live here—and what's wrong with that? A little slice of home, the chance to point and say "I was there!" What could be better?
1. It was already quite old at the time, but like a lot of schools my elementary school kept its Apple II lab going well into the next eras of computing. ↩
2. Education, M. of. (2004, March 29). Educational Computer Game Will Help Students Achieve. https://archive.news.gov.bc.ca/
3. Crosscountry Canada 2. (ca. 2004). Ingenuity Works Inc. https://web.archive.org/web/
4. Here labelled Queen Charlotte City; it wasn't officially renamed until 2022. ↩
5. Canadian Firm Carves Niche Selling Software About U.S. (1992, October). The Computer Paper: B.C. Edition, 5(10), 63. ↩
6. The same article mentions plans for Ontario and BC versions for Apple II, but neither of those happened at the time. It's also interesting to compare their North Dakota game to the famous Where in North Dakota Is Carmen Sandiego? ↩
7. Education, M. of. (2004, March 29). Crosscountry B.C. Content. https://archive.news.gov.bc.ca/