Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo Soundtrack, Manfred Linzner, 2000
One day historians will sit down and determine how many hundreds of licensed platformers were released for the Game Boy and the Game Boy Colour. Then again, we might never know the exact number – the market share of both platforms was so large that even local releases promised commercial success. Case in point: Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo (and no, there was no second episode, so maybe things didn’t turn out as planned). The game was based on an animated TV series, which in turn was an adaptation of a weekly German comics magazine first published in 1953. The magazine ran for decades and at the height of its success boasted a circulation of several hundred thousand per week. Of course, abroad the two anthropomorphic foxes and their friend Lupo weren’t particularly well-known, so this Game Boy Colour title remained an obscure Germany-only game.
While very few will remember Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo, it deserves a place in the annals of game music for its outstanding soundtrack. It was one of the earliest works by Manfred Linzner, who had graduated from the Amiga demo scene of the mid-1990s to scoring commercial products. After writing music for several Amiga games, Linzner began to focus on Game Boy Colour and later Game Boy Advance titles. His productivity in these early years of his career is astounding – for the years 2000-2002, Mobygames lists 36 music credits for Linzner! The highlights from this fertile period of his career are Iridion 3D and the Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo soundtrack.
