Grover's Music Maker by Atari

Grover's Music Maker is an unreleased 8KB stereo cartridge, as I said, from Atari and Children's Computer Workshop.

It was to be a part of the Children's Computer Workshop line of games, but it started out with the title Monkey Music and featured a monkey instead of Grover.

Isn't that dumb?

Not that monkey.

It was announced along with the four released CCW games the day before the 1983 Winter CES on January 5th, and then shown somewhere at CES.

On Atari Mania, there is footage of the CES from a show called The Nightly Business Report, and that has footage from Cookie Monster Munch and Grover's Music Maker.

The two games seem to be recorded differently, or the game setup is in a different place for each game.

I'm not sure if that's clear, but I think you'll see what I mean if you watch the clip.

There's a video of the Atari booth from that CES that the National Video Game Museum posted, but Grover is not shown in that video.

Grover's Music Maker appeared in an Atari Games catalog, the one titled A Guide to the Atari Stars, and it had 70 games inside.

The CCW games only had drawings of the characters, except for Alpha Beam, which hadn't added Ernie yet.

The CCW games oddly have different part numbers in this catalog.

They're in the 2800 series.

The 2800 was the system that Atari released in Japan, which is basically identical to the Sears Video Arcade 2 that saw a limited release in the US.

The April 1983 issue of Video Gaming Illustrated said that Grover would be released in May of 1983.

Apparently, an Atari Kids Library press kit exists that puts the release date in July 1983 with an MSRP of $34.95, but unfortunately, I could not find a copy of that press kit.

Before we get started on the game, I want to give a little background on Grover as I am wont to do.

His first appearance was as the monster Gleep in a Christmas sketch with Arthur Godfrey on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967.

It seems to me like he was voiced by Frank Ozher, who was the voice of Grover from 1970 to 2012.

He's also a dark green instead of blue and has a red nose instead of a pink nose.

Grover made a cameo in the fascinating documentary show called The Muppets on Puppets in 1968, where he was the middle head of a three-headed rock and roll monster and was voiced by Jim Henson.

He was also voiced by Jim Henson in a very brief cameo in an IBM internal film that spoofed Laugh-In.

I guess you had to be there for that one.

It's really, it's weird.

There's a short color clip on YouTube from 1969 where Henson and Frank Oz are standing in front of a table and talking about the Muppets.