This was brought up in the latest episode and was suggested as a thread of its own so here it is!! Let‘s talk about games you got out of cereal boxes back when that was a thing… is it still a thing? I for sure haven’t seen it.
I'm gonna start with the holy grail of cereal box games, Chex Quest. This game was very important to me as a kid. I grew up poor and couldn't get my hands on new games all the time, so I became obsessed with freeware of any kind (fan games, demos, and games I found in boxes of food).
I'm sure many of you have heard of this game, but if you haven't, it's really incredible. I'm still blown away that I got this out of a cereal box for free, because it is packed with content. My peers played Doom religiously, I played Chex Quest. Seriously, I spent hours on this game, and beat it countless times, looking for all the secrets and trying to get all the weapons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSjD8855qo0
It became quite the cultural phenomenon I guess, so much so that Limited Run did a [release](https://limitedrungames.com/collections/chex-quest)
So yeah, what sorts of free food games did y'all play??
Captain crunch crunchling adventure. You basically raise a little piece of sentient cereal like a tamagotchi. I don't remember the endgame but you could make it go skateboarding, like any game from the early 2000s worth its salt.
I love those cereal games! I still have my old CDs of Chex Quest and Cap‘n Crunch’s Crunchling Adventure and played them both to death. I love cereal mascots and cereal is still my default breakfast every morning. (Although oatmeal is my standard for the winter months) Cereal isn‘t my favorite food, but it’s probably the food that best represents my personality.
Chex Quest is obviously completely awesome. I mostly played console games at the time and I don't think I owned Doom, so getting a version of Doom in a cereal box is awesome. I also love the way a spoon replaces punching and the "super bootspork" is the replacement for the chainsaw.
Cap'n Crunch's Crunchling Adventure is kind of basic, you play mini-games to make your crunchling strong before you challenge some sort of monster enemy. There's no game over, if you lose, he offers you infinite remaches. But I had a weird interest in Cap'n Crunch lore (I was an odd kid) and so I ended up playing that game to death.
Something that isn't a game but I think is really rad is that the monster cereals would sometimes come with [flexi-disc records on the box](https://youtu.be/Z9eBnpqrdL4). As an alternate-reality thought experiment, it's neat to think that it would have been possible to distribute BASIC programs as audio recordings on cereal boxes in the 1980s if PCs were more widespread in their early days.
I keep thinking about this topic and how it‘s interesting that a lot of folks in my generation have a strong attachment to mascot characters. I never want to eat at McDonald’s but I think the McDonaldland characters were super-cool. I still buy Count Chocula every year and I absolutely would not do this if there wasn‘t a choco-vampire on the box. I also know I’m not the only person who will watch retro commercial compilations on YouTube.
It's just amazing to think HOW EFFECTIVE these ad campaigns were at getting deep into the heads of little kids, kind of predisposing us to like certain brands for life. Like, I think I have more fond memories of watching commercials with the Trix rabbit than I did watching certain ACTUAL Saturday morning cartoon shows. Even though I'm consciously aware of this phenomenon and can use that knowledge to remind myself "Count Chocula isn't some sort of artistic expression, it's just marketing trying to convince you to buy cereal" I will STILL BUY THE CEREAL.
My conscious brain knows that Chex Quest is just a Doom mod, but I don't care. My commercialism-poisoned brain thinks that wearing Chex armor, getting healing breakfast-items, and saving cereal-people is even cooler than fighting demons on Mars. And raising Crunchlings is AT LEAST as cool as Tamagotchi (but maybe not as cool as Digimon).
It's probably good that there weren't more cereal mascot games in the US. But also there's untapped potential for making cool mascot-heavy marketing campaigns for healthy cereals! Give me The Adventures of Captain Wheaties!
(Hope this isn't too off-topic, I just had to get more rambling about cereal marketing out of my system!)
https://archive.org/details/SonnyRace/SonnyRaceAutorun.jpg
