We’ve probably all heard it at some point, at least the millennial math rockers among us have – “what, math rock? Isn’t that, like, an old computer game?” It’s one of those stupid rhetorical remarks that’s bound to get your skin crawling, especially if you’re just trying to innocently describe the sound of standards and TTNG.
Alas, we can’t really stop them. We’ve just become accustomed to pretending the comments don’t exist. However, after years of ignoring these pesky, absolutely meritless comparisons, we were scanning through our Games section the other day and thought… could it finally be time?
Truth be told we only remember seeing the CD-ROM for Schoolhouse Rock: Math Rock for sale in places like Staples or Office Depot in the early 2000’s, and only a handful of times. We definitely were in possession of at least one Schoolhouse Rock title, but the memories are fuzzy to say the least, so at this point what’s the harm in revisiting this alleged 1996 classic?
How to we put this…
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Immediately after the publishing and developing credits, the game introduces you to your chaperone, a recreationally relaxed rabbit named Lucky that looks a bit like the loserkid bunny from Blink 182, a character that actually debuted three years later. That’s a whole other rabbit hole (hehe) we could get into, but let’s try to keep moving. You, the player, are whisked away to Funky Number Land, where your mission is to help Lucky win games and get his band together. Including Lucky, there are eight members total, so we’re betting this is less of a math rock band and more of a ska outfit or tribute act for the Grateful Dead.
The first band member we’re put in charge of rousing is a dog, who is understandably struggling to run a zoo. To earn the favor of this dog, and convince him to pursue a life of mediocrity with us, we help him put away the zoo animals – but only when they’re greater than 11, or match the shape painted on the animals already re-captured. What kind of zoo is this? Whatever, the dog is down to play – but he better sell the hell out of some merchandise because we’re pretty sure he doesn’t play an instrument.
Lucky then takes us to another quadrant of Funky Number Land, ‘where numbers are a way of life.’ This one is called the carnival, and on the way there you can see a wind spinner that actually just has four massive 4’s for blades, which would qualify as a bit of a high-brow moment if it weren’t such a damning reminder of the future unknowingly fostered by these schoolhouse rockers. If only they could have predicted the math that awaited.
We next find ourselves chilling down with a game of darts, but using a slingshot. It sounds hard, and yes there is some math involved, but this part is actually somewhat engaging. You can get the wrong answers over and over and still have fun slinging the shot either way, and it’s worth it to hear Lucky trying to hype you up. And now, we’ve got a magician in the band. We’ve got a rabbit, a dog, and a magician at this point, so we have to imagine we’re collecting these mates in some sort of descending hierarchal order. God knows what’s next.
Oh, funny actually – God is involved here, as we randomly seem to get a bit of indoctrination here via portrayals of the ark, Noah, and animals offloading post-biblical flood to illustrate the powers of multiplication. But the holy influence doesn’t last more than a few minutes, because suddenly Lucky has you whisked away to the moon. Why? Because he needs you to haul his dealer Hero Zero’s moon rocks into a rocket using very specific increments. Someone seems pretty dependent on these things but we’ll see how it goes. Also, The Dillinger Escape Plans will be pleased to know the maximum score possible in the first scenario is 43. So now the dealer joins the band, but we concede that this one makes sense on a number of levels, including the fact that on the side, he dabbles in the saxophone. We’ll have to stick him in somewhere.
On the way to our next stop, Lucky seems to have too many moon rocks and gets lost in a flashback regarding what seems to be a complicated history with the magician involving an accident, girls, a sports betting scenario, and potentially a secret human family. Once our rabbit-fiend makes it out of the haze, he decides we should take it easy with some nice, simple, not-risky-in-any-way ice skating. It turns out he knows one of the girls that works here, and she’ll come to the garage with us if Lucky helps her organize some team activities for the local skaters involving generally impossible 90-degree turns. Easy enough, and now things are starting to makes sense because she plays the drums, which are essential to our math-y jams.
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After a short break in the garage, we head out for some billiards. The local jazz cat is playing hard to get, and we heard we could challenge him to a game of balls in order to convince him we were up to snuff. That’s makes sense, or at least it’s kind of badass. Also, before we go any further, we can’t help but notice the “intense” inflection Lucky seems to sport whenever he says “Funky Number Land” in particular. We don’t have to get deep into it, but we’re about halfway through, and at this point it felt weirder not to say something. Now that’s out of the way.
After billiards, we get some fresh air at a farm while helping a farmer sort through some bales of hey. It seems some of them actually contain unattended children. The farmer shows his appreciation of course by lending us his acoustic guitar skills – he plays a mean pentatonic scale. We’re starting to feel like a real band over here, alright now! As we’re gathering our things in the garage, Lucky notices we don’t have the twelve-tone guy, so we head for… space.
Our last task it seems is to find an alien friend of Lucky’s named Twelve-Tone. We suppose we should have seen it coming. We have to do a bit of connect-the-dots and matching up some star charts, but we seem to identify Twelve-Tone’s frequency. Once we align our chakras with our alien keyboardist and they actually appear, they look pretty legit – they’ve got Max Rebo’s keyboard, but they’ve adapted it to one of those thrones the Prophets had in Halo 2. They also have a human mask but throw their head around like a juggler.
Our fully-formed polycule has but one more obstacle – the road itself. After a speeding ticket, we make it a few more miles down the road towards our first gig before the boredom sets in and we resort to spelling 5138008 on our calculators and literally doing math for fun. At a certain point we come to a crossroad, and Lucky sees that we can either take on an extra gig for cash, or potentially save some time by taking a side road and skipping the quest. Wait… sorry, for a second we thought we were seeing some sort of RPG-element being implanted. Maybe there’s multiple endings?
We’ll never find out, because we probably got the best one either way – we hit it big and end up on TV as Lucky Seven Sampson and His Funky Number Land Band. Lucky’s math was on point, and we had made it. We may not have learned a ton about math rock, but we do have a newfound understanding of what people really mean to say when they accuse math rockers of having anything to do with this fascinating relic of educational entertainment: they don’t know a damn thing about it. The dullest, most pretentious facets of math rock as such, has more to offer any prospective numerologists, and we just have to own it. That being said, if you convince said accusers to play this game and, ahem, do their homework, you will have gotten more than your money’s worth in vengeance.
(That was pretty snarky, truth be told, but lord – just sitting through the actual math had us flashing back to high school trig. Shout out to Good Boy on Youtube, we used their play through – there was no way we were going to install that. Anyway, thanks for reading! If you’re looking for more music, check out our Bandcamp compilations here. If you like us, or possibly even love us, donations are always appreciated at the Buy Me A Coffee page here,, but if you’re in a generous mood you can also donate to folks here, here, and here that could probably use it more. Thanks again!)