[ I posted a very related article about a year ago. This is an update 😉 ]
It taught me most of my starting vocabulary in English. It challenged me with some insane puzzles. And it probably was the only game I finished (I must have been 12-ish?), since I had no patience for skill based games (why am I playing Marathon today? I don´t know). This in a time when Internet wasn’t a thing. You had to call your friends on the landline hoping they would have an insight into why the damn trunk won’t budge.
Maniac Mansion was the game for me. I bought a PC (read: I convinced my parents to buy me one) just for its sequel, Day of the Tentacle. It is most likely the reason I got into programming, computer science, and the entire career that followed. I still dream of making my own point & click adventure today (and I will damn it).
But this is not what this post is about. This is about a song I made back in 2024 with my daughter. A song that tells a story about a girl. A girl obsessed with Maniac Mansion’s main protagonist: Dave. Hoping his mission (saving Sandy) fails miserably. She might have had something to do with her kidnapping as well.
So yes, a fan fiction song. Can´t put a genre on it, but I took inspiration from Jonathan Coulton who made the amazing Still Alive (that you all know from Portal) and also the hilarious Code Monkey, and maybe some Freezepop (they influence my music quite a bit).
So funny (yet dark) synthpop?
It took almost 2 years to get to a state I felt it was good enough for a proper release (that’s almost 2 years of music production class as well). And maybe it took that long because because 2024 sucked. And anything related to that year can mostly be forgotten (one of our cats was ran over, they stole our bike, I had a shitty bike accident, and to top it all off my better half got a diagnosis that changed the rest of our lives). But one good thing came out of it. My first song with my daughter. And it is time more people hear it, damn it (I’m not the easiest producer to work with, that poor thing :D).
She was 11 when she sang this. I kept the innocent vocals for the final release, even though I knew she could sing them so much better today (we have a lot of songs in the pipeline).
Oh, and I did send a version to Ron Gilbert at some point. He replied, and said it made his day. The guy that made Maniac Mansion, the game that set little Sven on a path of games, computer science, and more. I can´t believe I made his day.
Anyway, enjoy.!
YouTube and other links below:
Hey Dave on Spotify, Apple Music etc.