For over a year, I've been searching for a working copy of some old software I remember from primary school, called Kahootz.

It's a 3D educational movie-maker tool/game, which lets you put together small games and movies. Think 3D Movie Maker, but more modern and australian.

The reason I've spent so long hunting this down is because the program hasn't been available for purchase since 2012, isn't anywhere on the internet (the name "Kahootz" is now used by many other things), and it was only ever released in australia in a CD-ROM format. There aren't exactly many copies going around. I've tried ebay, amazon, a few bookstores. I even checked with local schools to see if they had any copies laying around and they didn't!

However, I had a moment of hope when I managed to locate a single copy of Kahootz 3.1 Home Edition being held in a library out in a rural town. My dad drove all the way out, over 2 hours away to pick it up for me. Unfortunately, my laptop only managed to copy about 60% before the disc stopped reading. It was all scratched up and corrupted from years of use, and what was readable had such bad bitrot that it wasn't usable.

In the end I uploaded whatever files I recovered to the internet archive and pretty much forgot about the whole thing. All hope was lost.

Until...

The other week, a friend of mine just casually mentioned he has a personal copy of Kahootz 2 that his Mum bought him when he was younger...

I put Kahootz 2 on the Internet Archive for anybody interested.

But I was still determined to find Kahootz 3, not the older version without all the scenes and features I remembered. Finding and archiving Kahootz 2 was an achievement, but I still hadn't achieved my goals.

So I went down another rabbit hole and uhh

One of the people commenting on the broken files I uploaded had actually found a working copy of Kahootz 3!

Yippeeeee!!!

I want to try decompiling this an seeing what interesting things I can find in there. Plenty more to come!

I'll be putting all project stuff up on this kahootz project page shortly