Wolfie’s Music Games

It was 1993 – I was learning to play piano, and I was also really into computers. One day my dad brought home a collection of ten mini-games titled Wolfie’s Music Games. The collection of games was for an awkward but lovable OS called MS-DOS. I had played many DOS games already, and had even started programming in Qbasic. But I had never seen a music-based game for MS-DOS before. With Wolfie I could play challenging time-based games while learning to read music and play piano. It was genius.

Now, in 2010, I recently found Wolfie on the interwebs, and decided to play it again. After a quick plug in to my DOS emulator, DOSBox, I had the games up and running. It brought back all the memories of brightly colored frustration and joy. It’s amazing what I considered a “great game” seventeen years ago. Times have certainly changed as far as gaming is concerned.

One of the crazy dialog boxes, which appears randomly to let you know you're doing great throughout any mini-game.

Now that I’ve played the game again, I realize how trippy it was… er, is. With it’s quick flashes of congratulatory dialog boxes and bright, insane color design, it’s like some sort of bad musical trip. It’s all topped off with enough bleeps and bloops to make my ears bleed. There was very little control over the sound itself for DOS games, and as a result many of the sounds were similar high pitched bleeps.

Along with the memories of joy and fun, I recall how annoying the game was (for may parents at least) after I played for more than twenty minutes. My mom would tell me to turn the sound down, and I couldn’t kill the repetitive beeping by turning the speaker volume down – it had to be done via the game’s main menu, since it was the on-board-speaker that played the chip music.

It’s almost like Mr. Paul T. Dawson (the creator of the game) knew the sound was annoying because he aptly titled the menu item that controls the sound: “Noise.” To most people, chip music is noise. And when I hear people call it noise, I like to tell the them that chip music is not only noise, but pulse waves as well – square, sawtooth, and triangle!

It truly is ludicrous.

Aside from the piercing beeps, Wolfie has five settings for the speed of each game. If you’re a Mel Brooks fan you may recognize the highest setting, Ludicrous Speed! Consequently, when playing some of the games I feel like Lord Dark Helmet did when he went Ludicrous Speed – some of the games are just downright impossible at that speed and leave me scrambling for the “emergency stop.”

If you can build your way up from Slooooooooooooooooooow and make it to Moderato, the game has done its job. It certainly doesn’t mask the fact that it’s an educational music-based game. You must know how, or desire to lean how, to read music in order to play.

Overall it’s a great piece of nostalgia, and the games are perfect for learning to read music with the speed and finesse of a musical cheetah. For a seventeen-year-old game I think it still has a lot of value today. I believe Mr. Paul T. Dawson had something there – despite the awkward OS in which it operated.