FlixMix (1993)

So, I wrote music for three lev­els of a PC game (FlixMix, pub­lished by Celeris in 1993). My career goal at the time was to write music for video games, so this was a pret­ty good opportunity.

The game ran in DOS, sup­port­ing only the low­est-com­mon-denom­i­na­tor music hard­ware; a sound card first released in 1987. So, the clips you’re about to hear might sound a lit­tle dated.

On top of that, there were com­pro­mis­es made to reduce disk space, and while I’d sub­mit revi­sions to com­pen­sate for each wave of those, opti­miza­tion con­tin­ued for months after my involve­ment in the project con­clud­ed. What was even­tu­al­ly pub­lished did­n’t sound bad, nec­es­sar­i­ly, but it did­n’t sound a whole lot like what I’d written.

Here’s what the pub­lic heard:

Lev­el 2: Quixot­ic Box Paradox

Lev­el 4: Mish­mash Mesh

Lev­el 7: Jug­gle Jumble

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I don’t have the “good” ver­sions any­more. They’re on an unla­beled disk some­where; I did­n’t think I’d need to keep track of them.

I do have this, though…

I dug up my old files for one of these a few years ago, and spit out a copy with more up-to-date tech­nol­o­gy (and way too much reverb):

Mish­mash Mesh — Remix

(Per­mis­sion to share these was gra­cious­ly giv­en by the pub­lish­er, whom I gen­uine­ly feel are good people.)

Any­way, this expe­ri­ence has had two pro­found effects on my career:

  1. I aban­doned it. Com­plete­ly. Walked away, nev­er looked back.
  2. As a web devel­op­er now, I fre­quent­ly have to weigh the cre­ative vision of the design­ers I work with against a sea of tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions, and in these con­flicts, I will always side with the design­er.

    Fierce­ly.

    Irra­tional­ly.

    I’ve been on the oth­er side of that, and I know how it feels.

*shrug*

11 Replies to “FlixMix (1993)”

  1. Me and Dad grew up play­ing Flix Mix togeth­er and we have loved how it’s more then just a puz­zle game and your won­der­ful music.
    The game has helped me thru dark times and your music is my favorite! espe­cial­ly the Mish­mash Mesh which is basi­cal­ly a giant net going up and down. :) 

    I would solve the puz­zle and then just lis­ten to the music a few loops after as it’s spe­cial sound­ing. I can’t remem­ber if you did any of the sec­ond puz­zle set.

    It’s fas­ci­nat­ing how the pic­tures move with the music and you have all sorts of options such as bonus locations,blank delays,reversed images.etc mak­ing the puz­zles nev­er get old. It’s too bad there was nev­er a THIRD alter­nate puz­zle set. 

    In fact I have Flix Mix right now for Dos Box because you can­not run the game on mod­ern com­put­ers so it’s Dos Box for me!
    I almost thought I’d nev­er see this game again until I found it for Dos Box.

    I first heard of this game thru Club Kid­soft which Dad ordered beca­sue he liked the con­cept of the puz­zles and frankly I did too.

    I have Autisum so I have a hard time with non-log­i­cal things so puz­zles are some­thing I enjoy solving. 

    I’ve noticed on the Jug­gle Jum­ble puz­zle the balls move faster at the bot­tom of the screen and slow­er once they reach the top to go back down.

    1. I loved FlixMix, and was proud to have worked on it.

      I always felt like, when you adapt a tra­di­tion­al game for use on com­put­ers, you should add some­thing that the orig­i­nal ver­sion could­n’t do. FlixMix had a lot of that. I think the design was very inno­v­a­tive, espe­cial­ly for its time. (Hats off to Lee Mor­gen­stern on all of that. He did an amaz­ing job)

      Unfor­tu­nate­ly, cre­at­ing new lev­els was nev­er a casu­al mat­ter. I wish there were more of them, myself. I also wish Celeris would revis­it the fran­chise on iOS, or in-brows­er. But I think FlixMix is pret­ty much shelved and for­got­ten at this point. Which is a shame, but at least we have Dos Box. =)

      Any­way, thanks for writ­ing in!

  2. Not only that but I searched for your name on Google after doing a looooooooong puz­zle you helped made. What a beast that puz­zle was!

    1. Hmm. Do you remem­ber where you found that puz­zle? I’ve con­tributed to a few things which might be what you’re talk­ing about, but can’t begin to guess where you’d have found any of them!

  3. One more thing. How was this post­ed at 1993 when there was no world wide web yet? There were BBS you could post at but those were actu­al­ly live where you could see what the oth­er per­son was typ­ing as they typed it.

    In fact if I was typ­ing this in a BBS and you were online you would see me make gram­mar cor­rec­tions (if any) and my let­ters appear­ing one by one.

    1. As much as pos­si­ble, I try to main­tain a coher­ent time­line on this site by back­dat­ing the posts of my old­er mate­r­i­al to when they were cre­at­ed. The down-side, of course, is that this wreaks hav­oc on the RSS feeds and ensures that nobody ever finds these posts. But it cre­ates a nice con­ti­nu­ity (albeit, as you point out, a retroac­tive one).

      For this post, the date I chose was pret­ty abstract. I picked the last day of the year FlixMix was pub­lished, when in fact my work on it was com­plet­ed months ear­li­er. I fig­ured that’s close enough to give it some context.

      (I do know that the songs were orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten dur­ing the aca­d­e­m­ic school year, as I wrote them between class­es. Fun fact: Alan Chap­lin, who com­posed a good chunk of the game’s music, was also my music the­o­ry instruc­tor at CalArts)

  4. One thing for sure is that the music was a lot bet­ter then what­ev­er the Apple did at the time which was just basic beeps and some kind of *fart* noise. 

    Com­modore 64 sid also sound­ed good so this game on the C64 would not have been bad at all because the SID espe­cial­ly if it was pro­grammed for Sid Stereo had a bright tone to it that was pleas­ant to the ears. 

    This music would’ve show­cased the many styles SID could imitate. 

    The NES sound chip was bet­ter on the drums like the famous *Air­ship* theme from SMB3 which has a LOT of tim­pani in it but sucked at the *bright­ness* the Com­modore 64 sound had.

    If this game was wait­ed till just a year lat­er it would’ve been able to use the AWE 64 sound board and been heav­ens better.

    1. Sad­ly, you’re mis­tak­en on that last bit. This game used 2 oper­a­tor FM syn­the­sis pre­cise­ly because it was the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor avail­able on every PC sound card. The increased capa­bil­i­ties of an AWE64 would have been wast­ed in ad-lib com­pat­i­bil­i­ty mode.

      That’s the main rea­son a C64 ver­sion would have had bet­ter music: con­sis­tent hard­ware across the plat­form. (Of course, that machine was­n’t up to the task graph­i­cal­ly. And if we were still going to fit the whole game and all of its resources on the low­est den­si­ty media avail­able, things would have got­ten squished even more dra­mat­i­cal­ly. But on the whole, I agree with you there.)

  5. Could you do a full game rip? Gal­ba­dia Hotel used to have the game rip but the links point to a non func­tion­ing serv­er and the peo­ple who go on the forums are the “LOL” kind of dudes who don’t have any­thing use­ful to say.

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