Fur Elise educational game?

March 11, 2024 5:16 PM

Trying to remember an educational game from the 90s and the only thing I recall was that Fur Elise was a common motif. Help?

It was educational in the sense that I think you needed to solve math puzzles or something to move forward, but I don't know if there was any specific topic of focus. A neighbor used to play this a lot sometime between 1992-1997, back in the era of Windows 3.1 where people usually used floppy disks and CD-ROMS were either super new or not really a thing yet. Most likely NOT an online game.

The only thing I remember was that Fur Elise got used a lot as the backing track. I don't know if it was part of a series - definitely not Super Solvers. It was in English, but we played this in Malaysia so I don't know if it's region specific.

This game has been racking my brain for DECADES because of Fur Elise and I don't know what it is!

posted by creatrixtiara to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I don't know if Fur Elise is in this one but Treasure Mountain has a similar thing - classical music and mild mathematical based gameplay for kids. It's deeply in my childhood memory so I looked it up a while back and there's places where you can play their old games in the browser even. If not that, another game by the same company maybe since it does use several classical pieces heavily including one Beethoven. More info here. It was called The Learning Company. Look at the list of Super Solvers games on that list maybe.
posted by lookoutbelow at 6:21 PM on March 11, 2024

Here's a list from that same website of video games which have Beethoven in the soundtrack, they often don't specify the piece though.
posted by lookoutbelow at 6:24 PM on March 11, 2024

Response by poster: lookoutbelow: definitely not Super Solvers, as mentioned in my post, but I'll look at the list.
posted by creatrixtiara at 6:46 PM on March 11, 2024

Was it outnumbered?
posted by cacofonie at 7:23 PM on March 11, 2024

More Greensleeves than Fur Elise in my memory, but could it be Encarta Mind Maze?
posted by papayaninja at 7:39 PM on March 11, 2024 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Outnumbered is Super Solvers. Definitely Fur Elise, not Greensleeves.
posted by creatrixtiara at 9:05 PM on March 11, 2024

Was it The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain? One of the sections has you unscramble the openings of famous pieces of music.
posted by basalganglia at 1:41 AM on March 12, 2024 [3 favorites]

ChatGPT suggests "The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary"
posted by AlSweigart at 12:15 PM on March 15, 2024

Another possibility from MobyGames:

Boxes (1996) - "The story behind the game is that the player has been left alone on a space station and has been left alone to stack the colour coded boxes. All the boxes come in pairs are the same shape and size. The playing screen starts with some fixed boxes scattered around and it is the player’s job to stack four blocks of the same colour together at which point they are removed from the screen, the level ends when all the boxes present at the beginning are removed. The shareware game is called Boxes and contains ten levels and the in-game music is a full midi rendition of Beethoven's Bagatelle No. 25 in A, more usually known as "Für Elise". The registered game is called Boxes: Championship Edition it has one hundred and fifty levels, more music tracks, more backgrounds and special boxes such as bombs and antigravity crates."
posted by Rhaomi at 11:01 PM on May 10, 2024