Nobody Cares About The Mattel Pixter (Except Me)
birdartwww // December 27th 2025
Above pictured is my childhood Pixter device and game collection. I have the 2005 Pixter Multi-Media System, the final device in a line of at least 10 handheld gaming consoles for children.
The Pixter line and their respective games were developed and released by Mattel under the Fisher-Price brand. Interestingly, there were not marketed as "edutainment" consoles, but instead as "do-anything handheld computers." Most of the software released was "creative" or non-educational in nature, and the devices featured basic PDA features like file save and load, a calculator, a stopwatch, and even an optional camera add-on that I remember seeing on the shelf at Toys-R-Us. That isn't to say there were no edutainment games released for the device; they released a bunch of them. Education just wasn't the main focus, and such games were instead generally relegated to a discrete "Learning" sub-brand.
All that to say: the Fisher-Price Pixter seems to be a genuine attempt to make a video game system for children. It was a good attempt, too! It's not a powerful device, but the games were all of good quality and featured gameplay and controls that kept the Pixter's many limitations in mind. It even featured a touchscreen before the first Nintendo DS released!
There were three main models in the line, each with their own game formats: the original Pixter, which had a low-res monochrome display, the Pixter Color, which doubled the resolution and added 126 additional colors to the palate, and, finally, my MMS, which has """video editing""" capability. Additionally, each device has back-compatibility with games from the previous system, with the MMS being able to play the entire library.
According to Wikipedia, at least 61 games were released in total, but the game lists on there have been marked as incomplete for more than 15 years. I can personally confirm the lists to be inaccurate, as I happen to own a game, Maze Mania, which, as of writing, does not appear on the Wikipedia article for the Mattel Pixter.
The Wikipedia article for this thing is one of the sorriest pages I've ever seen, by the way. It doesn't follow the usual Wikipedia style guides, and it only has citations from Mattel's customer service database.
Also, the Pixter page doesn't appear in the "List of Handheld Game Consoles" page despite the fact that the Pixter had more games released for it than several of the consoles that do show up there.
It's not just Wikipedia, either! Internet Archive has only a few hits related to the Pixter, and most of them are just user manuals. YouTube doesn't fare much better, as only a scant few uploads go into any real detail on the devices or their histories, and only a couple soundtracks have been uploaded. In fact, there is no "real detail" about these freaking things anywhere on the entire internet, barring this article from Joe Lacey, who worked on Pixter artwork, or the occasional interview with Barry Leitch, who worked on their SFX and music.
It's not even like the Pixter is rare or expensive-- the consoles, games, and even their accessories are all readily available on Ebay for fairly cheap.
No, the Pixter is plentiful, non-mysterious, and its developers are still alive and active. The sole reason for its obscurity is that nobody gives a dxmn about it.
Nobody except me.
I've been busy recording and mastering some of the music from my MMS and its games, as, understandably, very few people have ever thought to do this. So far, I've successfully retrieved some music from the system game, Crazy Word Factory, Maze Mania, Toy Designer, Learning: Global Passport, Learning: Math Mansion, and Symphony Painter. My dying, 20-year-old Pixter is, of course, fighting me every step of the way, but I'm truly giving it my all out here.
Audio out isn't great, some of the games have degraded to the point where the audio glitches, and it's impossible to get clean recordings of many of the songs because the Pixter is Fun and Cute, and if you idle too long it sends you to a screensaver, often with a unique music track.
Also, some games in the Learning line will not stop explaining what to do if you idle for too long (3 seconds) and, infuriatingly, WILL AUTOMATICALLY PICK RANDOM OPTIONS AND AUTO-ADVANCE IF YOU DON'T DO ANYTHING. I was gonna do Learning: Word Island, too, but I gave up on it because of this. Sorry.
Take a look at my broken copy of Math Mansion, which doesn't even play music half the time, and you shall understand but a Fraction my Struggles:
Anyway, now comes the fun part of the blog post where I have to justify and explain myself for caring about a toy for children. Not to worry--I've got a plan.
This is an original model Pixter. It's not mine; I found the image on Google. Take a second for me, and try and imagine what this thing sounds like. What kind of vapid, bleep-bloop LCD game nursery rhyme music, if any, does this thing spit out while it's playing stupid, languid, mindless games for babies?
...
OKAY TIME'S UP. WHATEVER YOU'RE IMAGINING IS WRONG. LISTEN TO THIS!
Listen to it. Really listen to it. This is the work of a skilled musician. Still not convinced? Just keep listening to it. Listen to the composition and instrumentation. Additionally, realize how powerful this thing's soundchip is. It's doing samples. On a children's toy from 2000. HOW DID THEY GET ALL THAT ON THERE?!?!
As far as I can tell, the music for the majority of the Pixter library was done by the same few people: Barry Leitch, Eric Swanson, and possibly Adam Zukic and Kristi Boeckmann, who can be found in the credits of some Pixter games. Of these, Barry seems the be the most prolific of the bunch, having composed the soundtrack to Top Gear for the SNES and, more recently, a very excellent soundtrack for a game called Horizon Chase.
According to this random YouTube video I found, Barry is also apparently the primary reason why this thing sounds so good, as he "constantly pushed for better sound hardware to work with" (21:45). He also seems to have won an award for his making of the children's LCD game go hard (21:25).
Oh, I wish I had that clean, full version of that Learning: Math Mansion BGM! It's not possible to record it from the device directly because of Cool and Fair reasons earlier freaking described, so I suspect the makers of this video must have gotten this song from the man himself. Barry Leitch please contact me!!! I want your music files!!!!
It's weird to put names and faces to the people that made these songs; these songs that have been burned into my head.
There's something interesting with a lot of the Pixter tracks I've found:
Remember how I mentioned that the Pixter switches to a screensaver if you wait too long? Usually, it's about 30 seconds of inactivity, and then whatever song you're listening to stops and restarts from the beginning when you click out of the idle mode. Lots of these songs, after that 30 second mark, start to become extremely compositionally interesting. Case in point:
Ugh. I think this one might be my favorite of the bunch. It's a simple song, don't get me wrong, but that drop is so catchy and effective. I think about it all the time. I'm literally listening to it on repeat right now.
That video from earlier mentioned that Mattel higher-ups didn't want anything too crazy in the music, so I have this crack theory that Barry had to hide the Good Stuff behind the idle screen. I can imagine him walking into a board room with a live device to get the music approved, and the bored executives sit and listen to it only until the idle music kicks in and they go "ughhhhadjka;anwebnuuzuidbud yeah that,s, fine,,"
Did uhhhhhhhhh did Grant Kirkhope write this one? It's my personal opinion that the composer was neck deep in Banjo-Kazooie while they wrote the Maze Mania soundtrack. That game would have been fairly new at the time Maze Mania released (2001), so I think it's a genuine possibility.
I also managed to record some of the system music from my MMS. Here's the title theme; timeless and iconic to an extremely specific Genre of person, (me):
Now, you may notice something interesting about these "Top Menu" songs. First, go listen to "Toy Designer - Top" again. Pay attention to the melody.
Done? Great! Now, take a listen to this:
It's the! the melody! The same The Emelody! The TH! one from the Main Menu ! it:s the same motive! you really do care !!! ah!!!!
wait... where have i.. heard this before...?
Jokes aside, it seems that all of the mainline Pixter games and BIOSs (this is an insane sentence) have continuity in their musical compositions, and they all share variations on the same motives! The MMS has a different version of the motive, but, if you listen closely, you can still hear the old one in there at the end! This is incredible! I hope nobody released any video game soundtracks in the year 2015 that brought the idea of Leitmotivs into the general consciousness and thus made all video game musicians overuse them forever as a result!
Oh... this one's really nice.... I know it's kind of crunchy and clippy, but put all that aside for a moment. Listen to the whole thing. Do you see the vision? Listen to it...
Is that... Is that a Casio keyboard demo?? Um?? Excuse me??? Barry???? BARRY??????
This game actually has credits, so I can confidently say that Eric Swanson composed the music (and Barry did SFX). Anyway, this is the Learning: Global Passport song that got recorded the best, in my opinion. All the other ones are super rough--either Eric was punching way above the Pixter's weight or my copy of the game has degraded from being legally old enough to drink Alcohol. I'm leaning towards it being the latter.
I could go on about the music on this thing, but I've run out of good images for this blog post, and I don't want to boot my Pixter back up and spend my entire day photographing the darn thing. Instead, I urge you to go listen to the entire 40 minute collection of music yourself, which I have uploaded to the Internet Archive for the Good Of Humanity. I may add to this collection later down the line if I feel like it, but I think that I've already recorded the best stuff that wasn't impossible to get clean.
If anyone out there still has a working one of these things with games I don't have (especially the older and/or the non-licensed ones), I urge you to get in contact with me so we can add to the archive! Same goes for people who worked on this thing! If you have clean Pixter music files from development then please give them to me i want them!!!!!! thank you :)
