About Us

In 2001 Quaint Interactiv DBA Music Games International (“MGI”) was founded on an idea to take timeless masterpieces from Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Vivaldi and transform them into PC games for kids. After MGI was named a finalist and Business Track Runner-Up at the 2002 Harvard Business School New Venture Competition, Access Industries became MGI’s largest investor.

“We started by turning Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker into an interactive musical game,” says co-founder Sasha Gimpelson. “My partners were two award-winning composers.”

Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, The Music Game launched in 2002, followed by Mozart’s Magic Flute and Alice in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons just a year later. The PC games immediately struck a chord with young audiences and families. Parenting Magazine praised the “ingenious audio puzzles” and “gorgeous watercolor-washed scenes and stellar sound quality.” SuperKids.com called the music puzzles “a truly fascinating concept.” According to Computing With Kids, “the musical jigsaw puzzles are always fun.”

Educators recognized that playing the games reinforced important listening and pattern recognition skills. Many reviewers noted how addictive and fun the musical jigsaw puzzles were, and how children and parents couldn’t stop playing them. Discovery Schools called them “highly entertaining games that kids will enjoy playing again and again.” In a review of Alice in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the New York Times wrote, “It is obvious from the imagination and care put into these altered arrangements and the other puzzles that Seasons was created by people with a deep understanding and appreciation of music. The game feels less like children’s edutainment than like the work of musical evangelists who consider music a powerful, life-changing force.”

The trio of releases was a resounding critical success, winning the Excellence Prize from the Japan Media Arts Festival and more than 35 entertainment and education awards. Along with the 2003 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers, the games were recognized by multiple prestigious Parents’ Choice Gold Awards, NAPPA Gold Awards and Amazing Toy Awards from BabyZone.com. Accolades included a “Best Pick for the Holidays” by USA Today, Teacher Raves Awards from Scholastic’s Instructor Magazine, and an Editor’s Choice Award from Teaching K-8.

Children in 13,853 schools saw the games and played them. The CD-ROMs were distributed to more than 13,000 music educators and included in the Pearson Education textbook package for elementary schools. Mini-game versions were handed out by the New York Philharmonic at a Young People’s Concert in Lincoln Center, in the Boston Children’s Museum, and at Nutcracker performances of the Boston Ballet and Pittsburgh Ballet.

Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf was slated to be the next interactive release, but that’s when the project stalled. High production values garnered glowing press coverage but also made the games expensive to produce. In the early 2000s, it cost $450K to produce three games. “We were ahead of our time,” Sasha says. “Because of the uncompressed music files, our games were over 150MB each. They could not be played online or downloaded. The Flash software required more processing power and memory to run, which resulted in performance issues that caused the games to get stuck.” The company was shuttered in 2005.

Then something amazing happened. In August of 2025, more than two decades after the games’ initial release, Sasha discovered that @Ninjacat1396 had posted playthroughs of the games on YouTube, pulling in 31,736 views with 35 subscribers. @Music4Homeschool with 54 subscribers got 37,322 views. “Amazing!” Sasha says. “The comments viewers left are simply fantastic.”

“Thanks to YouTube and social media, interest in our interactive musical games is surging,” Sasha says. “We are now gearing up to engage new audiences of players, from children to adults who nostalgically remember playing our games as kids. People who played our games as children are now becoming parents themselves.”

Today, faster internet speeds and HTML5 updates mean that these games can be downloaded in less than a minute to personal computers, tablets and phones.

Sasha envisions making the highly acclaimed Music Jigsaw Puzzles with Music AI track generators next. He predicts, “Music bands will make puzzles using our software and animation to enhance audience engagement, drive sales and increase visibility and reach.”