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Escape The Room - Music Inspired By The Dawn of Computer Gaming

by Deirdre "Dottie" Maetrichs

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Main Title 01:45
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about

a dispatch from the dawn of computer gaming!

Deirdre Maetrichs ("Dottie" to friends and colleagues) was a German-American born near Reading, Pennsylvania in 1952. Deirdre was a programmer at Pineapple Electrics during the 70s until inherting a small fortune from her uncle Otto in 1979. She retired young, bought a modest house, and took up a hobby composing music with a program she had written herself (the C.L.E.O.patra I software synthesizer, the first four letters of the name standing for "Charming, Luscious, Exciting Organ"). The program and its two successors (the C.L.E.O.patra II and III) are ill-understood, being written for the obscure Pineapple Pioneer 400 personal computer in the system's obtuse programming language Fruitparse, but all three were quite ahead of their time. Knowing this, two friends (Jeroboam Hook and Lorraine Irons, together forming Ironhook Sofware) frequently comissioned her to provide soundtracks for their games for the system. Throughout the early and mid 80s, Deirdre soundtracked such Pinapple Pioneer cult classics as *Reign of Terror*, *The Curse of Cleopatra!*, *Young N' Skip*, and *Puzzle Palace*. Jeroboam's sudden death in 1989 put a stop to most of Ironhook's games (and the Pioneer had been effectively obsolete for several years at this point anyway). Still, Lorraine completed one final game--*Escape From The Magic Castle*--patching together what had been left behind by the late Jeroboam. *Magic Castle* was never widely released, only distributed among a few friends, and the game itself is known to exist today only in partial form (the Pioneer's obtuse "data card" storage system was ahead of its time in capacity but prone to corruption, even by the standards of the era. Indeed this philosophy--ahead of its time technically but unbelievably fragile--is probably what lead to the downfall of Pineapple), and until now, the only known copy had no music.

However, before the game was completed, Deirdre played its soundtrack for another friend, classical musician Elizabeth Dwight, who recorded it to cassette, and often listened to it in her spare time. It was only recently, with Mrs. Maetrichs' tragic passing in 2017, that Dwight has seen fit to share this final recording with the public, a soundtrack for a lost game on a forgotten system, from the dawn of the age of information. That soundtrack is now presented by Diamondfish Archival Recordings, for your enjoyment and contemplation.

Lest you fret, weep not for Mrs. Maetrichs. Following her career as a computer musician, she married Ms. Irons, took up the violin, and she is succeeded today by her still-loving wife, and their two adopted children, Elmer and Myrtle.

credits

released February 1, 2018

composed entirely with a Deputy-II VST software synthesizer, in FL Studio (with the exception of the snares on track 1).

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