Can you play Grover’s Music Maker online?
Only partly. The game was designed for the Kid’s Controller, a large keypad with twelve buttons made for Atari’s children’s games. The emulator on this page does not emulate that keypad, and the game does not use a joystick. The cartridge will load, but you cannot enter notes or start Grover’s dances, because those actions need the keypad buttons. Treat this page as a look at a lost prototype rather than a playable game.
- Restart the cartridge: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Colour or black-and-white picture: F2
How the game works
Grover has ten dance moves, and each one is tied to a musical note, so every tune becomes a little dance routine. The game has two modes. When a letter is shown on screen, pressing the 0 key makes Grover dance to one of 18 built-in songs. Some are well-known nursery tunes such as “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Hickory Dickory Dock”; others are much more obscure.
When a treble clef is shown instead, the game is in recording mode. Here a child can key in a sequence of up to 50 notes, and Grover performs the whole routine when 0 is pressed.
The story behind Grover’s Music Maker
The game was part of a series developed with the Children’s Television Workshop, the makers of Sesame Street. It was programmed by Stephan Keith, with music by Catherine Keith. Unusually for the series, it did not start out as a Sesame Street game at all: its first version, Monkey Music, starred a dancing monkey. Grover was added later to make the cartridge easier to sell.
According to the programmer, he himself asked for the game to be cancelled. He felt that a recording limit of 50 notes was too small and that the cartridge would not earn back its production costs. Playtests also went badly: the children found the big Kid’s Controller awkward and soon lost interest. The surviving prototype is dated January 1983 and is believed to be a finished version of the game.
Similar games to play next
- Alpha Beam with Ernie – a released cartridge from the same Sesame Street series
- Big Bird’s Egg Catch – Big Bird catches eggs in another game from the series
- Cookie Monster Munch – Cookie Monster collects cookies in this Sesame Street title
- Oscar’s Trash Race – Oscar the Grouch stars in another cartridge from the series