The Making Of

How a 1994 CD‑ROM
came back to life

One disc, a decompressor, and a swarm of robots reading a children's encyclopedia.

Somewhere in the 1990s, a kid sat in front of a beige computer and fell in love with animals. The window on the screen was Microsoft Dangerous Creatures — a 1994 multimedia encyclopedia of the planet's most fascinating, ferocious, and venomous animals. Lions, cobras, great white sharks, the blue‑ringed octopus. You clicked, you read, you watched grainy little videos, and you learned.

That game was the dream behind this project: to bring it back, modern and open, so any kid with a browser could meet those creatures again. Here's the story of how a three‑decade‑old disc became the website you're using right now.

A time capsule on a disc

It started with a single file: the original CD‑ROM image, preserved on the Internet Archive — 607 megabytes of 1994, frozen exactly as it shipped. Mounting it revealed a tidy little world: 66 folders, one per animal, named by four‑letter codes like LION, COBR, and GWSH (great white shark). Inside were thousands of images, sounds, and video clips, all tied together by a master database the original program used to know what linked to what.

Cracking it open

The videos were easy — an ancient codec called Microsoft Video 1 that modern tools convert in a blink. The narration was plain audio, still crisp after all these years. But the images refused to open. Their files didn't start with the usual picture header; they started with the letters SZDD.

That was a clue. SZDD is Microsoft's own compression format from the early '90s — a way of squeezing files onto disks back when every megabyte counted. Nothing on a modern Mac could read it. So the fix was to write a tiny decompressor, about forty lines long, that understood the old format and unpacked each image back into a real picture.

The first one we unpacked was the lion. A photo of a male lion mid‑stride across golden grass — pixel‑perfect, exactly as it looked in 1994. Thirty‑one years asleep, and it woke up flawless.

The twist: text made of pixels

Unpacking that lion screen revealed the project's central puzzle. It wasn't just a photo — it was the whole page: the title, the article, the little red labels you click. All of it had been painted into a single image. The words weren't stored as words anywhere. They were pixels.

That meant a faithful copy would be frozen forever — fixed in size, impossible to translate, invisible to screen readers, unsearchable. Not exactly "for any kid." So the project took a different path.

One game, two faces

Instead of choosing between old and new, this rebuild offers both — from the same restored material:

A toggle at the top of every creature flips between the two. But making the Modern version meant doing something to all 66 animals that sounded almost impossible: reading the text back out of those flattened images, word for word, and turning it into structured data.

133 robots read a children's encyclopedia

Six hundred screens of text, transcribed by hand, would have taken weeks. So instead, the work was handed to a small army of AI agents working in parallel.

Each animal got its own agent. That agent looked at the creature's nine‑or‑so screens the way a person would — actually seeing the images — and transcribed every word: the intro, the fun facts, the sub‑topics, the photo captions. It even estimated where each clickable hotspot sat on the screen, so the Classic mode would still work. Then a second agent re‑read the same screens to catch any slip the first one made. Sixty‑six animals, checked twice.

Keeping it honest

When all 66 were done, one final agent read the entire collection at once, acting as an editor — making sure every animal used the same labels, the same voice, no duplicates. It tidied up small inconsistencies automatically. And, satisfyingly, it caught things a tired human would miss:

The leopard had accidentally borrowed the jaguar's tagline. The python was called "the world's longest snake," though its species is actually the African rock python (the reticulated python is the real record‑holder). The orca's "never killed a human" is only true in the wild. Each of these got flagged for a human to decide — because faithfulness to the facts matters as much as faithfulness to the original.

What you're looking at

Everything here was reconstructed from that one disc: a forty‑line decompressor woke the images, a video converter restored the films, and a swarm of agents liberated the words. The result is the encyclopedia a kid loved in 1994 — faithful when you want nostalgia, modern when you want to learn, and built to keep growing.