They immediately broke the nostalgia spell when they used 'smh' in the opening game, that was like hitting a brick wall of anachronism. Neat effort though. Glad someone got paid to make it.
A proton and a neutron walk into a bar and order beers. Bartender says to the proton, "That be $10." He turns to the neutron and says "For you, no charge."
For the Atari 2600, Game Boy, etc., the first cartridges were nothing more than a ROM chip on a printed circuit board. Later games sometimes included a lot more functionality on the cartridge (battery-backed save RAM, bank switching hardware, etc.) which does make things complicated very quickly. Today, programmable logic is sometimes used to replace old custom IC designs used in cartridges, or to design something new.
For games more complicated than a simple ROM chip, the Game Boy presents an interesting challenge: the cartridge is both very small and it needs to be able to run off battery power. That excludes using both a high-power-consumption modern SoC or FPGA, or using lots of discrete logic.
But if it'll fit in 32 KB, it's 3D print a case, order a PCB, and program a standard Flash chip.
> For the Atari 2600, Game Boy, etc., the first cartridges were nothing more than a ROM chip on a printed circuit board.
We've actually come full circle on this one. If you ever disassemble a Nintendo Switch Game Card that has a black area above the metal contacts, it doesn't even have a PCB. It's just a ROM chip, with metal contacts on the bottom shaped differently than your standard BGA pattern, contained in plastic. If it has a green area above the metal contacts, it's a PCB with the chip on the other side.
It's pretty trivial for a company to make a mold for a plastic cartridge. The chips are nothing special, they are just ROMs. Cheap and widely available.
In fact, I'm pretty confident that a competent DIYer could 3D print a cartridge shell, flash a ROM, and etch a PCB in an afternoon or two.
Either it's in the console ROM, in which case it's not a problem, or it's in the cartridge ROM, in which case I'd imagine it's just a matter of replacing the raster data with something else.
It's in the game, but the console famously checks that the code for the logo is present, and refuses to run any game which doesn't have the code in place.
It was used as a way to prevent anyone unauthorized making games. If you copy the logo, you have violated trademark and copyright law, and if you don't copy the logo, your game won't run.
If I remember correctly, the ROM gets read once to check, and then again to display. One could use some circuitry to deliver another logo on the second read.
The idea is that by forcing games to include the trademarked Nintendo logo in the game ROM, an unlicensed dev would be guilty of trademark infringement if they used the logo.
>Just be sure to order some McDonald’s to support them. Who knows… if we keep eating McDonald’s, they might keep producing these oddball retro gaming related projects.
>I, for one, will NEVER stop eating McDonald’s. You have my word.
Uh... hail marketing! Nothing quite like getting nostalgia exploited for corporate profits. But hey, its important to support... uh... 'retro gaming?'
TBH, there are also quite a few posts here in this thread where my internal ChatGPT detector goes off. The funny thing is, they could also very well be meant ironically, and I can't really separate this anymore.
The anti-corporatism shtick is so lame. Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad. Just because something is an advertisement doesn’t make it bad.
I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.
For me, it's the McChicken. The best fast food sandwich. I even ask for extra McChicken sauce packets and the staff is so friendly and more than willing to oblige.
One time I asked for McChicken sauce packets and they gave me three. I said, "Wow, three for free!" and the nice friendly McDonald's worker laughed and said, "I'm going to call you 3-for-free!".
Now the staff greets me with "hey it's 3-for-free!" and ALWAYS give me three packets. It's such a fun and cool atmosphere at my local McDonald's restaurant, I go there at least 3 times a week for lunch and a large iced coffee with milk instead of cream, 1-2 times for breakfast on the weekend, and maybe once for dinner when I'm in a rush but want a great meal that is affordable, fast, and can match my daily nutritional needs.
Thankfully you don't have to be too concerned. It's for the same reason Miracle Whip doesn't actually call itself mayonnaise, and Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise does. Mustard, garlic, etc., are not mayonnaise ingredients.
Indeed, you're right. I thought at its most basic it is just egg whites and oil, but googling that specifically says mustard is part of the recipe.
So it's still a mystery why McDonalds doesn't just call it Mayonnaise when the ingredients are pretty much identical to every other mayonnaise out there, including Hellmann's REAL Mayonnaise.
Maybe it's one of those "It's only X if it comes from the X region" type issues. It just makes it sound suspicious for no discernable reason. Like buying a bottle of "Wet 'water' style beverage."
Right. My experience in this realm is often the store employee either charging me or acting like I'm stealing from their personal savings account by asking for extra sauce.
I'm no expert, but I thought we should prefer farm raised, no? Seems weird to advertise they are wild caught when that's a big concern with over-fishing in the wild.
Literally everything you do has an impact in some way on the environment. If you want to boycott everything, you won't have an existence.
Living is all about understanding trade offs and making informed decisions. Just because plants don't scream when you kill them doesn't mean a plant-only diet is without negative effects as well.
My understanding of the situation is that the U.S. federal government has been doing an excellent job of managing fisheries over the past couple of decades — there was an overfishing crisis in the 80’s, but since then we’ve gotten our act together and implemented population monitoring and fishing quotas. There are definitely problems (especially with certain methods of fishing causing bycatch problems or habitat destruction), but researchers and regulators seem to be mostly on top of them. Farm-raised fish have their own set of challenges — mainly health concerns and the potential for environmental disasters [0] — so there’s not necessarily a clear winner between farmed and wild fish. It also depends heavily on the particular species of fish.
My source for this is an elective class I took at Oregon State University a few years ago, taught by a professor who is deeply involved in fishery research and management. So perhaps he was biased, but from what he presented I was thoroughly impressed with the sustainability practices of the seafood industry. One of my big takeaways was that wild Alaskan halibut in particular (which is what McDonald’s uses) is among the best seafoods, and one of the most sustainable foods in existence.
I agree with you broadly, and despite their abhorrent reputation for sourcing unethical animal products, it does seem that you're right about McDonald's fish. However, on a larger scale, one of the hidden ethical pitfalls is that a lot of wild-caught fish comes from international waters, where there are no regulations whatsoever, or are imported from Asian countries with little to no regard for such things. Japan infamously still allows whaling. The global fishing industry is also rife with modern-day slavery.
> or are imported from Asian countries with little to no regard for such things. Japan infamously still allows whaling. The global fishing industry is also rife with modern-day slavery.
Those are very good points that I neglected to mention, and my professor spent a lot of time discussing them. One of the main points of the class is that seafood sustainability is extremely dependent on the species of fish and the country of origin, and so it’s important to do research on where your fish is coming from. I don’t remember a lot of details anymore, but I do specifically remember that most stuff from Alaska is excellent, and shrimp is awful in terms of ethics & sustainability.
The new burgers are better as well. It's not in-and-out but they improved the cheese and the patties have gone from "circular cardboard" to "kind of resembles a burger" on the quality scale. For folks that live in Europe and have access to better McDonalds this might not be anything new, but for us it's a big upgrade.
What is rational about being cynical that I want to spend my money on things I think are cool?
Maybe there's merit in asking why I think it's cool to begin with (and in this case I hardly think mcdonalds is responsible for people who like gameboy games), but there doesn't seem to be much to gain in asking myself why I want to spend money on things I like. What else should I spend my money on?
They made a Gameboy game and now you're buying hamburgers.
If you're doing a 'vote with your wallet' thing to try to convince them to make more retro games that at least makes sense, even if id argue it's a little naive, but that's not even what were talking about. They made a videogame and now people are pledging to buy their hamburgers.
It makes perfect sense. McDonalds did something unconventional and apparently popular. People that found that valuable send the strongest signal you can send in an economy - money. "Corporate profits" take a look at the bank and they think "hmm, that seemed to work, we'll do more of that". They might not produce another gameboy game, that signal might need to be calibrated over further attempts to figure out why people bought more hamburgers. But certainly some signal concerning the approach they took will be loud and clear.
Acknowledging that it’s a multifaceted mega-corp (and some of the facets are bad) is it really naive to associate excellent marketing with moral goodness? What is this marketing doing if not signaling that at least some of the company reflects values you support? Deciding to support the company by buying hamburgers logically follows.
I’m enjoying the corporate apologetics personally. I’ve heard there is a Christian resurgence among the youth, and this makes me wonder if there will be a resurgence of pro-capitalism sentiment as well. Ideas, values, culture: it all evolves with time.
McDonalds obviously made the game in the hope that it will sell more hamburgers. If you buy a hamburger, their strategy worked, which means they (and other companies that are watching) have a reason to do similar things in the future.
What’s weird about incentivizing behavior you like in the hope that you get more of that behavior?
The behaviour in question isn't simply producing retro games. It is producing something unique and interesting that their competitors are not offering. It is an edge.
If their competitors copycat McDonalds' marketing, they totally didn't get that message, because by the time they clone it, the uniqueness McDonalds demonstrated does not apply to them - they've made a copy, or even a shadow of what came moments before. The edge McDonalds had is their cliff to behold unless they find something unique to counter with.
Yeah, the evisceration of corporate-everything has really unnecessarily crowded out enjoyment of all the good parts, while at the same time somehow managing to look more ridiculous as a POV than I ever expected.
Back in the edgy days, I never thought I'd find blanket-corporate-hatred becoming quite so lame, to the point of even taking on its own corporate-style blandness, in the 2020s...
I say it with humor, because it sounds like an oxymoron. But it does describe a certain wealthy, anti-capitalist clade here in Portland. (And I'll happily point that out to my friends, whether or not we agree on things).
I was just thinking of the last time I was waiting in my car at the McDonald's drive-thru with the rest of the proles, and a friend called. When I told him where I was, he had let out an involuntary "ugh" sound, and expressed that he can't believe I eat that garbage, let alone support that corporation. This particular friend owns a business that serves billion-dollar corporations, lives in a $1.2M house, drops $200 on bottles of wine at fine restaurants (where he's known for showing up in Transformers pajama bottoms) and grows almost all his own vegetables. Bernie stickers all over his (multiple) Subarus.
I guess "privileged commie" was a bit of wry shorthand, but it's not that much of a stretch.
It’s funny since pricing is set based upon social behavior (do we spend that or not and/or should we charge that or not?) capitalism is socialism with obligation to carry around a mind virus that preserves the figurative identity of Bezos and the like; they’re “better” capitalists.
I mean, socialism is capitalism with a mind virus that encourages displays of self-sacrifice, without really eradicating greed. Personally I think hypocrisy is more corrosive than ambition, and bitterness is more corrosive than misplaced hopefulness. (I also don't compare my worth to others based on money, and I don't envy the likes of Bezos. I do enjoy being paid and occasionally buying things that make my life more enjoyable, but certainly not because other people can't afford them; holding a grudge upward or holding a superiority complex downward would be the kind of "mind virus" you describe, but it's totally unnecessary if all you want is to have an enjoyable and productive life in a capitalist society full of fun shit and chances to build things that people in communist societies couldn't have dreamed of).
The thing I love most about Portland is that you can have these intellectual debates almost everywhere you go, really get to hear other people's thought processes based on their personal situations, and understand where they're coming from. I'm by no means a hard-liner; but I spend half my time out in Newberg which has an entirely different set of baked-in assumptions and priorities. I'm as likely to get into deep debates with people there as I am here, but far less likely to get into interesting theoretical territory. At least this place still has the ferment, the ideological exploration and experimentation of one of the 1920s capitals of Europe, as opposed to the stochastic but rigid normie-core preference structure of everywhere else in America. I appreciate that.
American culture is sick from advertising. There will never be enough anti corporate sentiment anywhere. You should assume these businesses are killing you and know it because that's the one thing they reliably do. Anything else is to distract you from that. If they do something "nice" you can bet they could have done more better.
> Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad
I don't think anyone was saying this. Some airlines plant trees. That doesn't make planting trees bad.
But massive corporations (with maybe ~1% or fewer exceptions) don't base their practices on anything remotely resembling bad or good, and this leads them to profit-seeking behaviours that harm people on an individual level (which I think is a "bad" thing), as well as the planet, the environment, the economy, their competitors.
McDonalds is not a good or ethical company. The corporate apologism is "so lame".
I would otherwise be 'on your side' but this is not a great take. Lockheed Martin's profits also help pay for pensions. Phillip-Morris as well. I don't think this makes their business actions a net good.
Lockheed Martin's profits pave way to Pax Americana, unprecedented peaceful period in world history, deter China and Russia and helped getting Saddam, Gaddafi and Miloshevich to justice. It would be a net good to humanity either way.
Relativism is used as a universal cudgel to reason that some short-term good of limited scope, outweighs a widespread long term bad behavior.
Moral objectivism is more popular than moral relativism.
ie Some good does not outweigh lots of bad.
> Their profits pay pensions of the ordinary people. How is that not a good thing?
It's difficult to take your comment as anything but raw trolling, as it intentionally chooses to strawman limited benefit by ignoring obvious consequence.
Their profits exist solely because they exploit and steal from other ordinary people. Most ordinary people will lose far more money to labour or wage theft than they'll ever gain from profits.
> I don't think anyone was saying this. Some airlines plant trees. That doesn't make planting trees bad.
Then you misunderstood the comment in question. It was quite clearly saying this. We're reading an innocuous blog post, and this person is aping reddit /r/hailcorporate language to vilify a marketing ploy by McDonald's, "exploiting nostalgia blah blah blah."
You're right, they are not a good or ethical company. If it's corporate apologism to disagree with this complaint about "exploitation" of nostalgia, count me in as an apologist too. This doesn't register on the list of corporate misdeeds for me to be mad about. I'm more upset with "flushable wipes" that end up clogging local sewage systems.
It's hard to see what they misunderstood. The comment is about this thing being done by McDonald's rather than "something ... done by a massive corporation". The difference is in the specificity.
The point I get is not that "advertising from any large corporation is Bad" but instead that advertising from a corporation whose operations are Bad is Bad (because that specific corporation is Bad). It reads to me as an uncharitable take that OP is saying "making retro video games is Bad" (because large corporations are Bad) when I read "McDonald's being McDonald's is Bad" (because McDonald's is Bad).
You think that finding a way to get food in front of people at the largest possible scale and the lowest possible marginal price hasn't helped anyone at the individual level? In your own words, they don't base their practices on good or bad. Meaning their actions should be statistically uncorrelated with doing help or harm. You can say its not a good or ethical company, but you can also say its not a bad or unethical company either. It just is, and that was kind of the point.
> You think that finding a way to get food in front of people at the largest possible scale and the lowest possible marginal price hasn't helped anyone at the individual level?
I agree with your point. McDonald's value meals have been a staple for low income households for a long time, and from what I hear the app provides daily deals that can mean the difference between someone going hungry or not.
Of all the corporations a person could get mad at, choosing one that is well known for feeding low income families is an odd choice.
The parent comments only criticism was this was done by a large corporation. There is literally no other substance to their comment.
The behaviour you’re describing as profit seeking is also really just value seeking, as in providing something that their customers value. I don’t think there’s substantial moral consequences one way or the other for a company to do this, but there’s nothing wrong with enjoying or commenting on a corporation providing a product that you value.
If anyone can find a spark of counterculture in 2023 I encourage it. There is no longer a battleground for the soul of society. It's safe to say the suits won.
Are you familiar with normcore? There's an argument to be made that the most counterculture thing you can do is to semi-ironically eat a Happy Meal in order to support indie Gameboy devs
Of course there is a battleground. The counterculture is more alive than ever. It's just all been thoroughly subsumed by capitalism.
Those kids on the streets protesting most recent excesses of multinational corporations? The hoodies and Guy Fawkes masks they're wearing, the signs they're holding, the chains they're rattling - all bought on Amazon, happily providing specialized merch for the "fuck the system" market niche. And what do those kids achieve? Mostly they generate attention that moves newspapers and keeps millions glued to where they can be best exposed to ads. Etc.
Yes, the suits love the anti-corporate movements. They are a quite profitable form of entertainment.
Counterculture doesn't really work post-90s because mainstream culture started embracing all the previously marginalised groups.
You can hold an illegal gay rave under a bridge, and in response mainstream media figures will write articles demanding the permit process be made easier, then McDonald's will retweet photos of your ravers eating a meal the morning after. This is...okay, I guess. Social permissiveness is the circus, and it's still good even though our share of the bread is constantly shrinking.
Hmm, I think I actually have something to contribute here in terms of understanding: you're right that counterculture doesn't really exist as it may have in the past, but the desire to show individuality still is there which has led to a progressive acceleration in the edginess/weirdness of modern meme culture.
If you feel slightly put off by the memes you see and/or discourse around them, it's sort of by design. It's meant to differentiate.
I've only recently realized this though (as I've expanded my perspective), and I think for the most part, this is something that largely happens subconsciously. If you ask someone gen z or younger, they won't know what you're talking about if you ask. That's mostly because your baseline of edginess/weirdness is defined by relative experience, and someone who's grown up perpetually online is likely to be skewed much more differently than someone who hasn't.
Hate to break it to you but the counterculture in the 2020s is the mindset of Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, and that overall crew. They are the ones pushing back against mainstream consensus and institutions, for better or worse! Really gives a perspective on how the "counterculture" glorified by the baby boomers was perceived by the older generations.
Chex Quest was my first FPS and only many years later did I learn about Doom. It all clicked and my gratitude for whoever at General Mills was responsible for the title flowed immensely.
> I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.
Plenty of people will have plenty of issues with a major corporation. But it's worth pointing out that McDonald's is one of the most prominent fast food chains which has no problem with animal abuse in terms of products from horribly treated livestock animals. They have trouble even making their french fries livestock-torture free .
Maybe this issue doesn't personally matter to you, but it does create a huge problem for a company that does something so shamelessly unethical.
Kinda makes me think of those tobacco advertisements of yesteryear. It's like "oh hey, Winston cigarettes sponsored the Flintstones, I'll never stop smoking Winstons."
Who knows, perhaps one day we'll look back on modern day fast food ads and consider them equivalent to cigarette ads.
I cannot read any enthusiastic endorsement of McDonald's without thinking of the meme/patent [0] from Sony proposing that viewers skip commercials by yelling brand names at their TV:
If it’s only officially playable through an emulator I wonder why didn’t just use a modern game engine to make something in a pixel art style? This is definitely more interesting though
Do they advertise it as a Game Boy Color game anywhere? I wouldn’t be surprised if they can’t (or rather don’t want to risk it) for trademark reasons
Edit: The game page itself doesn’t mention it but the article has information on how it was made and by who so they must have got the information somehow, maybe the developer talked about it
I can't quite tell if this is written by an LLM (and aided by a person, re: the developer is known) or the writing style is just so prolific that LLMs cant help but ape it.
I think it's because every sentence is pretty short.
These sentences end up being related, and should probably be just one paragraph.
The writing style seems to separate everything out, I can say this might be what gives the impression of a LLM gluing parts together!
I wonder if they received a McDonalds presser, and I wonder how much of those are still human-in-the-loop.
I can't quite tell if this comment is written by an LLM (and aided by a person) or the writing style is just so prolific that LLMs cant help but ape it.
I think it's because every sentence is pretty short.
These sentences end up being related, and should probably be just one paragraph.
The writing style seems to separate everything out, I can say this might be what gives the impression of a LLM gluing parts together!
Well the author, Anthony, is a digital nomad who's known for minimal effort fluff pieces so it would seem like a natural progression to use LLMs. At some point retro dodo might skip the middle name and render him unemployed.
I know I sound bitter but it's because retro dodo used to be a high quality production shop (still mostly is, to be fair). Though I understand that it wasn't sustainable for the original two guys to do everything alone (they've branched from blogging to youtubing to even book publishing after all)
The era where "retro" meant "NES" is behind us, now retro means Game Boy Color, PS1, and Quake-era PC aesthetics. To wit, the developers of Shovel Knight (the premier NES platformer homage) are developing a GBC-styled Bloodborne-like called Mina the Hollower: https://www.yachtclubgames.com/games/mina-the-hollower/ (though sadly it's not designed to run on original hardware).
Many in the community, such as the long-running Retronauts podcast, use 10 years as the line when something becomes "retro". By that definition, the PS4 becomes retro later this year.
I'd even argue that any console that is no longer in production can be considered retro; after all, you're then dependent on secondhand consoles and repairs to be able to play things on them; they have become a finite product.
There are Gen Z that played PS3/Xbox 360 when they were children, and are now adults out of college with their own children. I think that's a good measure of "retro", and it would mean PS4 will enter retro status in ~2031.
Most modern games could be ported to the PS3 and Xbox 360, keeping gameplay the same but lowering graphical fidelity. The same cannot be said of porting N64 games to the NES. I think a better measure of retro-ness would include the degree to which gameplay experience is influenced by the game's age.
I find it difficult to call any PC that has a CPU clock expressed in GHz retro / vintage. Even though I know PCs 20 years ago were already in that ballpark.
I'm currently playing around with a PC I built up from random parts, based on an AMD Duron 1200. I have Windows 98 SE on it. It does feel retro. But then I compare it to my 486, and it suddenly doesn't anymore.
Well, both have the same access to the SSL/TLS web: almost nil. With W95 on the 486 with 32MB of RAM and a de-IE4'ized W98 both would be virtually the same except for the speed.
A Pentium II would be a better example for both: Not too old, not too recent. Yet it suits as retro and a usable machine. Enough to render some XVID videos at 360p and 420p with a good video card. Slackware, NetBSD and lot of distros would still run fine. TLS under Lynx and Gopher would still work, the same as a Gopher client.
In the late 90's to early 2000's, I considered "retro" games to be anything from the beginning of time right up the the NES. So, roughly anything that fell out of popularity about 10 years in the past. It didn't seem weird because in the late 90's, we were calling everything in the '80's retro. All that funky synth music and hair was pretty weird and alien to those who grew up on either side of it, after all.
The most modern gaming system in our living room (if you don't count the Steam Deck) is a Wii which is legitimately a retro system these days and I get a little grumpy every time I am reminded of this.
Nope. I was born in 1987, and Chinese NES clones were sold well up to 1997 until everyone in ~1999 got a Play Station at home as the prices went down. So, to US, retro was NES and the older GB games such as Mario Land 1.
There's a mismatch between GBT Player and the GB hardware due to what can be expressed in the .mod format, meaning GBT is only capable of really beepy sounds (unless you're super good). hUGE gives more control over the hardware since it was made for it (and you can losslessly import GBT .mods). Ultimately though you can use whatever works for you, there are other drivers out there as well.
The music sounds particularly awesome, first thing I noticed is how deep the bass sounds given the limitations of the medium.
Looks like it is using a separate tone for the initial kick, and then a sweep an octave lower, it really sounds huge. This is the first time hearing a Game Boy game through nice headphones though, so I'm not sure if this is also present in older games.
The questions it raises are almost more interesting then the game.
Why GBC? Did someone have a canceled but mostly finished mcdonalds game laying around since the late 90's and finally the right person at mcdonalds heard about it and got corporate to let them publish it as a marketing tie in?
Why did they decide to make a retro game and then hire a member of the gbc homebrew community? The choices behind this are interesting. Even after somebody successfully convinced corporate to fund this game it's surprising someone else didn't say "we could do this in Unity for half the price."
It really only makes sense to me if someone on the corporate ladder was already a fan of the gbc homebrew community, or close to someone that was.
If you want something retro is seems a lot easier to just get someone who made a quality homebrew game to make you one rather than search for some generic Unity shop and have them make something good that looks sufficently retro.
That's a really interesting point. It's probably much easier for a skilled developer to make a cool, natively retro game with modern tooling. I wonder if there's a future for freelancers in this space?
I was wondering how a newly made Game Boy Color game would be distributed today:
> But today, twenty five years after the Game Boy Color was released, we can play Grimace’s Birthday for free on our web browser.
> It is unclear if McDonald’s hoped to keep the game locked on their website or if there’s any particular reason they wouldn’t want us to have a ROM. (I would assume something something emulator, something something copyright infringement.)
> But needless to say, the internet was very quick to rip the file and share it online.
Now I want to track it down so I can tell what's different when I play the inevitable rom hacks.
This isn't even the first legitimately interesting video game connection to McDonalds, weirdly.
Treasure is an influential game development studio that did a lot of really interesting work in the mid to late 90s, responsible for games like Gunstar Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, Bangai-o, Silhouette Mirage, Dynamite Headdy, Mischief Makers, Alien Soldier, and others. They were a bunch of ex-Konami developers (who had worked on games like Contra 3, Axelay, Super Castlevania 4, the arcade Simpsons) who were tired of making license games and wanted to make their own original games. A few of their games did well in the market, but they and their particular approach to innovation in action game rule systems has had a much, much bigger impact on other action game developers since.
And their very first game when they left Konami and started their own studio, the game they had to make to stay afloat to make Gunstar Heroes, was... a Sega Genesis McDonalds game, the 1993 "McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure".
I've seen Pepsiman played at a GDQ[0] event and it is such good entertainment. I forget which year it was but I remember commentary about how the community found the guy who did the acting ("Pepsi for TV Game!") in the game and how he claimed to have been specifically directed to use broken English.
Not even the only McDonald's branded game of the era! I played MC Kids growing up on NEWS and it also was a dramatically better game than it had any right to be. Not quite the same storied history but still recommend playing if you're looking for some hidden NES gems.
I played that alot as a kid. I struggled with staying focused to beat a game, especially with the infamouse Sonic 3 Carnival Night Zone before the age of Youtube. This game was one of the first I was able to beat as a kid.
In beginning of the game, the McDonalds logo only appears on a garbage can and if you run into it - you die. It's a positive message for health conscious parents.
Back in college (now 15 years ago) I did an analysis of fast food menus for a nutrition class.
McDonalds turned out to be the easiest to get a healthy meal from at the time. They had things like salads, apple slices, and a much wider variety of items than other fast food restaurants meaning that if you were to eat there every day it was much easier to make different healthy meals than it was at the others but like an order of magnitude.
Basically just skip the soft drink and only occasionally order the fries and you'll be fine.
The last time I tried McDonalds apple slices they somehow tasted like chemicals. I wonder how much of their "healthy" food is actually healthy. You could recreate a lot of their menu at home using fresh/real ingredients and it'd probably be a lot healthier than the stuff they ship all over the country in plastic, pumped full of salt and preservatives, then wrapped in PFAS.
McDonalds used to be dirt cheap (in the UK), so you could eat there if you didn't have much money. Now it's pretty expensive if I eat there with my kids I could easily spend £20+. It would be way cheaper for me to buy real food and prepare it at home and their price is getting comparable with REAL pub and restaurant food. Given most of their stuff still tastes like cardboard I only go there when my kids need a fix, despite it being walking distance from my home.
yeah a lot of people in this thread seem to be completely unaware of GB Studio's existence, which is funny because a lot of people learn to make games in GB Studio nowadays. The GB Studio scene is pretty active.
Whilst there has been mention of the 1993 "McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure", I'm surprised nobody has called out their previously lost DS Game[1]. The game was distributed to McDonald’s locations throughout Japan in 2010 for the training of existing employees[2].
Does anyone know if I can check which Mcdonald's have these? I have a bit of a retro collection and this would be a cute artifact to add.
Oh it isn't a physical cart run. I was curious about the logistics of such a thing. If it were a physical cart I'd like to take a peek inside and see the board.
The entire project probably cost about as much as a couple months on an urban billboard (around $100,000 or so) and the ROI is probably higher.
So this was likely a reasonable investment. You're going to get YouTubers covering it, people doing speed runs, blogs and news aggregators. Good return.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 394 ms ] threadThe accompanying website is a blast from the past too,
https://grimacesbirthday.com/
Though they could have. Limited Run Games does Gameboy cartridges. I'm not sure what kind of tooling they use for it though.
You can get brand new Atari 2600 cartridges in boxes and everything.
Though, I think the shells are actually scavenged from old games.
Yup, new titles still being made. There's even Halo for the 2600.
Tons of titles currently being manufactured for a lot of vintage consoles/computers: https://atariage.com/store/
For games more complicated than a simple ROM chip, the Game Boy presents an interesting challenge: the cartridge is both very small and it needs to be able to run off battery power. That excludes using both a high-power-consumption modern SoC or FPGA, or using lots of discrete logic.
But if it'll fit in 32 KB, it's 3D print a case, order a PCB, and program a standard Flash chip.
We've actually come full circle on this one. If you ever disassemble a Nintendo Switch Game Card that has a black area above the metal contacts, it doesn't even have a PCB. It's just a ROM chip, with metal contacts on the bottom shaped differently than your standard BGA pattern, contained in plastic. If it has a green area above the metal contacts, it's a PCB with the chip on the other side.
In fact, I'm pretty confident that a competent DIYer could 3D print a cartridge shell, flash a ROM, and etch a PCB in an afternoon or two.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:13605
Limited Run Games does runs of physical Gameboy cartridges still. They have to restyle things to not have Nintendo branding, but it can be done.
It was used as a way to prevent anyone unauthorized making games. If you copy the logo, you have violated trademark and copyright law, and if you don't copy the logo, your game won't run.
Detail here: https://catskull.net/gameboy-boot-screen-logo.html
That's why all modern consoles use digital signatures.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade?wprov=sfti1
But couldn’t you also write an exception in the emulator itself? (I’m actually not sure - just genuinely curious!)
>I, for one, will NEVER stop eating McDonald’s. You have my word.
Uh... hail marketing! Nothing quite like getting nostalgia exploited for corporate profits. But hey, its important to support... uh... 'retro gaming?'
The anti-corporatism shtick is so lame. Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad. Just because something is an advertisement doesn’t make it bad.
I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.
One time I asked for McChicken sauce packets and they gave me three. I said, "Wow, three for free!" and the nice friendly McDonald's worker laughed and said, "I'm going to call you 3-for-free!".
Now the staff greets me with "hey it's 3-for-free!" and ALWAYS give me three packets. It's such a fun and cool atmosphere at my local McDonald's restaurant, I go there at least 3 times a week for lunch and a large iced coffee with milk instead of cream, 1-2 times for breakfast on the weekend, and maybe once for dinner when I'm in a rush but want a great meal that is affordable, fast, and can match my daily nutritional needs.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/ca/en-ca/product/mcchicken-sauce-p...
Miracle Whip ingredients: water, soybean oil, sugar, vinegar, modified cornstarch, egg yolks, salt, mustard, spices, potassium sorbate, calcium disodium EDTA, dried garlic.
Thankfully you don't have to be too concerned. It's for the same reason Miracle Whip doesn't actually call itself mayonnaise, and Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise does. Mustard, garlic, etc., are not mayonnaise ingredients.
So it's still a mystery why McDonalds doesn't just call it Mayonnaise when the ingredients are pretty much identical to every other mayonnaise out there, including Hellmann's REAL Mayonnaise.
Maybe it's one of those "It's only X if it comes from the X region" type issues. It just makes it sound suspicious for no discernable reason. Like buying a bottle of "Wet 'water' style beverage."
You probably already know this, but fast food 5 times a week is basically putting in a request for health problems.
e: Wow, I got sniped big time.
Huh. My experience with McDonald's: never met daily nutritional needs, no longer affordable and struggling to be fast.
Living is all about understanding trade offs and making informed decisions. Just because plants don't scream when you kill them doesn't mean a plant-only diet is without negative effects as well.
And a fourth option, it seems. However dark.
My source for this is an elective class I took at Oregon State University a few years ago, taught by a professor who is deeply involved in fishery research and management. So perhaps he was biased, but from what he presented I was thoroughly impressed with the sustainability practices of the seafood industry. One of my big takeaways was that wild Alaskan halibut in particular (which is what McDonald’s uses) is among the best seafoods, and one of the most sustainable foods in existence.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress_Island_Atlantic_salmon...
Those are very good points that I neglected to mention, and my professor spent a lot of time discussing them. One of the main points of the class is that seafood sustainability is extremely dependent on the species of fish and the country of origin, and so it’s important to do research on where your fish is coming from. I don’t remember a lot of details anymore, but I do specifically remember that most stuff from Alaska is excellent, and shrimp is awful in terms of ethics & sustainability.
They did something cool and now you want to give them money. Why is that?
Maybe there's merit in asking why I think it's cool to begin with (and in this case I hardly think mcdonalds is responsible for people who like gameboy games), but there doesn't seem to be much to gain in asking myself why I want to spend money on things I like. What else should I spend my money on?
They made a Gameboy game and now you're buying hamburgers.
If you're doing a 'vote with your wallet' thing to try to convince them to make more retro games that at least makes sense, even if id argue it's a little naive, but that's not even what were talking about. They made a videogame and now people are pledging to buy their hamburgers.
I’m enjoying the corporate apologetics personally. I’ve heard there is a Christian resurgence among the youth, and this makes me wonder if there will be a resurgence of pro-capitalism sentiment as well. Ideas, values, culture: it all evolves with time.
McDonalds obviously made the game in the hope that it will sell more hamburgers. If you buy a hamburger, their strategy worked, which means they (and other companies that are watching) have a reason to do similar things in the future.
What’s weird about incentivizing behavior you like in the hope that you get more of that behavior?
If their competitors copycat McDonalds' marketing, they totally didn't get that message, because by the time they clone it, the uniqueness McDonalds demonstrated does not apply to them - they've made a copy, or even a shadow of what came moments before. The edge McDonalds had is their cliff to behold unless they find something unique to counter with.
Back in the edgy days, I never thought I'd find blanket-corporate-hatred becoming quite so lame, to the point of even taking on its own corporate-style blandness, in the 2020s...
Corporate blandness has infected us all; from my reference frame you’re just some bland text on a corporate website that silences spicy discourse.
Are others lame or is that all you feel given hypernormalized routines?
Look at the rebels willing to risk going against this thread by eating McDonalds; highway to the danger zone.
How bold
I was just thinking of the last time I was waiting in my car at the McDonald's drive-thru with the rest of the proles, and a friend called. When I told him where I was, he had let out an involuntary "ugh" sound, and expressed that he can't believe I eat that garbage, let alone support that corporation. This particular friend owns a business that serves billion-dollar corporations, lives in a $1.2M house, drops $200 on bottles of wine at fine restaurants (where he's known for showing up in Transformers pajama bottoms) and grows almost all his own vegetables. Bernie stickers all over his (multiple) Subarus.
I guess "privileged commie" was a bit of wry shorthand, but it's not that much of a stretch.
Also hi from Portland
The thing I love most about Portland is that you can have these intellectual debates almost everywhere you go, really get to hear other people's thought processes based on their personal situations, and understand where they're coming from. I'm by no means a hard-liner; but I spend half my time out in Newberg which has an entirely different set of baked-in assumptions and priorities. I'm as likely to get into deep debates with people there as I am here, but far less likely to get into interesting theoretical territory. At least this place still has the ferment, the ideological exploration and experimentation of one of the 1920s capitals of Europe, as opposed to the stochastic but rigid normie-core preference structure of everywhere else in America. I appreciate that.
So yeah, greetings from inner southeast ;)
> Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad
I don't think anyone was saying this. Some airlines plant trees. That doesn't make planting trees bad.
But massive corporations (with maybe ~1% or fewer exceptions) don't base their practices on anything remotely resembling bad or good, and this leads them to profit-seeking behaviours that harm people on an individual level (which I think is a "bad" thing), as well as the planet, the environment, the economy, their competitors.
McDonalds is not a good or ethical company. The corporate apologism is "so lame".
Moral objectivism is more popular than moral relativism.
ie Some good does not outweigh lots of bad.
> Their profits pay pensions of the ordinary people. How is that not a good thing?
It's difficult to take your comment as anything but raw trolling, as it intentionally chooses to strawman limited benefit by ignoring obvious consequence.
Exactly - they base it on profit and people who think this is good react accordingly
Then you misunderstood the comment in question. It was quite clearly saying this. We're reading an innocuous blog post, and this person is aping reddit /r/hailcorporate language to vilify a marketing ploy by McDonald's, "exploiting nostalgia blah blah blah."
You're right, they are not a good or ethical company. If it's corporate apologism to disagree with this complaint about "exploitation" of nostalgia, count me in as an apologist too. This doesn't register on the list of corporate misdeeds for me to be mad about. I'm more upset with "flushable wipes" that end up clogging local sewage systems.
The point I get is not that "advertising from any large corporation is Bad" but instead that advertising from a corporation whose operations are Bad is Bad (because that specific corporation is Bad). It reads to me as an uncharitable take that OP is saying "making retro video games is Bad" (because large corporations are Bad) when I read "McDonald's being McDonald's is Bad" (because McDonald's is Bad).
(where Bad = "not good or ethical")
I agree with your point. McDonald's value meals have been a staple for low income households for a long time, and from what I hear the app provides daily deals that can mean the difference between someone going hungry or not.
Of all the corporations a person could get mad at, choosing one that is well known for feeding low income families is an odd choice.
The behaviour you’re describing as profit seeking is also really just value seeking, as in providing something that their customers value. I don’t think there’s substantial moral consequences one way or the other for a company to do this, but there’s nothing wrong with enjoying or commenting on a corporation providing a product that you value.
Like Winston at the Chestnut Tree Cafe
Those kids on the streets protesting most recent excesses of multinational corporations? The hoodies and Guy Fawkes masks they're wearing, the signs they're holding, the chains they're rattling - all bought on Amazon, happily providing specialized merch for the "fuck the system" market niche. And what do those kids achieve? Mostly they generate attention that moves newspapers and keeps millions glued to where they can be best exposed to ads. Etc.
Yes, the suits love the anti-corporate movements. They are a quite profitable form of entertainment.
You can hold an illegal gay rave under a bridge, and in response mainstream media figures will write articles demanding the permit process be made easier, then McDonald's will retweet photos of your ravers eating a meal the morning after. This is...okay, I guess. Social permissiveness is the circus, and it's still good even though our share of the bread is constantly shrinking.
If you feel slightly put off by the memes you see and/or discourse around them, it's sort of by design. It's meant to differentiate.
I've only recently realized this though (as I've expanded my perspective), and I think for the most part, this is something that largely happens subconsciously. If you ask someone gen z or younger, they won't know what you're talking about if you ask. That's mostly because your baseline of edginess/weirdness is defined by relative experience, and someone who's grown up perpetually online is likely to be skewed much more differently than someone who hasn't.
Plenty of people will have plenty of issues with a major corporation. But it's worth pointing out that McDonald's is one of the most prominent fast food chains which has no problem with animal abuse in terms of products from horribly treated livestock animals. They have trouble even making their french fries livestock-torture free .
Maybe this issue doesn't personally matter to you, but it does create a huge problem for a company that does something so shamelessly unethical.
They haven't cooked their french fries in beef tallow since 1990.
No one needs to "support McDonalds", and no one needs to be encouraged to. It'll do fine.
There are a lot of autists on social media, sadly not excluding HN.
Who knows, perhaps one day we'll look back on modern day fast food ads and consider them equivalent to cigarette ads.
> Say "McDonald's" to end commercial
> "McDonald's!"
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e6xOBCAVvA
Edit: The game page itself doesn’t mention it but the article has information on how it was made and by who so they must have got the information somehow, maybe the developer talked about it
I think it's because every sentence is pretty short.
These sentences end up being related, and should probably be just one paragraph.
The writing style seems to separate everything out, I can say this might be what gives the impression of a LLM gluing parts together!
I wonder if they received a McDonalds presser, and I wonder how much of those are still human-in-the-loop.
These sentences end up being related, and should probably be just one paragraph.
The writing style seems to separate everything out, I can say this might be what gives the impression of a LLM gluing parts together!
Artificial limitations encourage the use of short and snappy communications.
Also, who can be bothered to read through a paragraph today?
I live my life one sentence at a time.
Songwriters write songs when they haven't got anything to sing about.
Directors make movies when they haven't got anything to make a movie about.
Copies of copies of copies... It's no wonder people are tired. Where is the substance? Where is the risk?
I know I sound bitter but it's because retro dodo used to be a high quality production shop (still mostly is, to be fair). Though I understand that it wasn't sustainable for the original two guys to do everything alone (they've branched from blogging to youtubing to even book publishing after all)
I like to make sure my main points are easily readable.
A Pentium II would be a better example for both: Not too old, not too recent. Yet it suits as retro and a usable machine. Enough to render some XVID videos at 360p and 420p with a good video card. Slackware, NetBSD and lot of distros would still run fine. TLS under Lynx and Gopher would still work, the same as a Gopher client.
The most modern gaming system in our living room (if you don't count the Steam Deck) is a Wii which is legitimately a retro system these days and I get a little grumpy every time I am reminded of this.
So... Xbox One and PS4 launch games?
https://nickfa.ro/index.php/HUGETracker
Looks like it is using a separate tone for the initial kick, and then a sweep an octave lower, it really sounds huge. This is the first time hearing a Game Boy game through nice headphones though, so I'm not sure if this is also present in older games.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010708042828/http://www.yahool...
Why GBC? Did someone have a canceled but mostly finished mcdonalds game laying around since the late 90's and finally the right person at mcdonalds heard about it and got corporate to let them publish it as a marketing tie in?
It really only makes sense to me if someone on the corporate ladder was already a fan of the gbc homebrew community, or close to someone that was.
> But today, twenty five years after the Game Boy Color was released, we can play Grimace’s Birthday for free on our web browser.
> It is unclear if McDonald’s hoped to keep the game locked on their website or if there’s any particular reason they wouldn’t want us to have a ROM. (I would assume something something emulator, something something copyright infringement.)
> But needless to say, the internet was very quick to rip the file and share it online.
Now I want to track it down so I can tell what's different when I play the inevitable rom hacks.
"Big Mac®, World Famous Fries® (Medium), undefined"
Treasure is an influential game development studio that did a lot of really interesting work in the mid to late 90s, responsible for games like Gunstar Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, Bangai-o, Silhouette Mirage, Dynamite Headdy, Mischief Makers, Alien Soldier, and others. They were a bunch of ex-Konami developers (who had worked on games like Contra 3, Axelay, Super Castlevania 4, the arcade Simpsons) who were tired of making license games and wanted to make their own original games. A few of their games did well in the market, but they and their particular approach to innovation in action game rule systems has had a much, much bigger impact on other action game developers since.
And their very first game when they left Konami and started their own studio, the game they had to make to stay afloat to make Gunstar Heroes, was... a Sega Genesis McDonalds game, the 1993 "McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure".
Longplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNbmJyL872c
I've never played it, but it looks really solid and vastly better than it has any right to be.
Also let’s not forget about the long tradition of Pepsi video games including the interesting Japanese Pepsiman and the PlayStation release!
https://youtu.be/lNF3dBiSH4M
(2016: https://youtu.be/C33Xo1hE9XE 13:00 for the quote)
[0] https://gamesdonequick.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7kFfLRcHjU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nKywTkMnAs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.C._Kids
https://games.greggman.com/game/programming_m_c__kids/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.C._Kids
A cool game, fun and dynamic, with a bonus stage where you have to pick up garbage falling from the sky faster and faster, and sort it for recycling.
Because, yes, it was a game that wanted to brainwash you into thinking McDonald = environmentalism. What a joke.
McDonalds turned out to be the easiest to get a healthy meal from at the time. They had things like salads, apple slices, and a much wider variety of items than other fast food restaurants meaning that if you were to eat there every day it was much easier to make different healthy meals than it was at the others but like an order of magnitude.
Basically just skip the soft drink and only occasionally order the fries and you'll be fine.
>McDonalds turned out to be the easiest to get a healthy meal from at the time.
The McDouble is "The greatest food in human history" <https://nypost.com/2013/07/28/the-greatest-food-in-human-his...)
yeah a lot of people in this thread seem to be completely unaware of GB Studio's existence, which is funny because a lot of people learn to make games in GB Studio nowadays. The GB Studio scene is pretty active.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e6xOBCAVvA&ab_channel=NickR...
[2] https://kotaku.com/we-can-all-finally-learn-how-to-make-big-...
Oh it isn't a physical cart run. I was curious about the logistics of such a thing. If it were a physical cart I'd like to take a peek inside and see the board.
So this was likely a reasonable investment. You're going to get YouTubers covering it, people doing speed runs, blogs and news aggregators. Good return.