A Doom-Clone Found in CEREAL...? - Chex Quest (DOS) - Games You Never Played
17Kelloggs wishes they made this beast
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I'm Gaming Jay and welcome to GAMES YOU NEVER PLAYED, the gaming series where we play unreleased alphas, incomplete betas, rediscovered prototypes, and other games that are otherwise obscure, rare, or unheard of. And with that, today's game is...
Chex Quest
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest
Chex Quest is a non-violent first-person shooter video game created in 1996 by Digital Café as a Chex cereal promotion aimed at children aged 6–9 and up.[2][3] It is a total conversion of the more violent video game Doom (specifically The Ultimate Doom version of the game). Chex Quest won both the Golden EFFIE Award for Advertising Effectiveness in 1996[4][5] and the Golden Reggie Award for Promotional Achievement in 1998,[4][6] and it is known today for having been the first video game ever to be included in cereal boxes as a prize.[7][8] The game's cult following[9] has been remarked upon by the press as being composed of unusually devoted fans of this advertising vehicle from a bygone age.[10][11][12]
In 2019, General Mills rereleased Chex Quest and its previously unofficial 2008 sequel, and presented a mini-documentary on YouTube.
Produced with a small team of developers on a budget of around $500,000, Chex Quest began life as the brainchild of the WatersMolitor promotion agency – an award-winning group that had been hired by Ralston Foods[nb 1] to reinvigorate the Chex cereal brand.[11] The original game concept was created by Dean Hyers and Mike Koenigs as a non-violent CD-ROM computer game to be released with 5.7 million boxes of Rice Chex, Wheat Chex, and Corn Chex cereals[3] in order to cast Chex as a cereal that was exciting and fun for children while appealing to modern sensibilities by targeting home PC owners.[6] The game would be a high-quality program whose normal retail value would be between $30[3] and $35.[11] However, it would be offered to consumers for free[6] with no increase to the cost of the cereal box.[15]
The development of Chex Quest differed from traditional video game development in that the basic game engine had already been created and the bulk of the creation process consisted of aesthetic changes made to the music and artwork from The Ultimate Doom. For budgetary reasons, Id Software was contacted and an inexpensive license was obtained for the Doom engine which was considered obsolete in light of Id's recently released Quake. Chex Quest was the first foray into professional game development for lead artist Charles Jacobi and programmer Scott Holman, though both had previously modded Doom levels in the past. In an interview with PC Gamer magazine in 2009, Jacobi stated that the biggest reason for the lasting success of Chex Quest has been that it is still essentially a disguised version of Doom with basically unaltered game dynamics.[10] Indeed, the game has been recognized for having a sense of humor about its identity and origins.[17]
Humorous aspects of the conversion take the form of ironic in-jokes related to Doom resulting from the more or less exact "translation" of previous non-essential Doom decorations into their non-essential Chex Quest equivalents. Thus the bloodied bodies and the twitching torsos from Doom become the goo-covered cereal pieces and the cereal victims twitching to extract themselves from goo in Chex Quest. Likewise, according to the plot the "health" meter represents the Chex Warrior's ability to move, with 0% representing being completely covered in slime and unable to move. The picture of the Chex Warrior in the status bar display becomes progressively more coated in slime, as opposed to bleeding as does the face in Doom. Because time was limited, pre-existing tools popular with the Doom fan community (such as the level creation tool Doombuilder) were utilized in level design, and sound effects such as the distinctive vocalization of the Flemoids were created by creative director Dean Hyers and audio designer Andrew Benson playing around in a sound booth.[18]
During development, aesthetic decisions had to be run by Ralston for approval and this resulted in a number of modifications. The zorchers, for instance, were originally intended to look like a classic raygun, though they were changed to look like a remote control or Star Trek tricorder due to Ralston's concerns that it looked too much like a violent gun. All of the higher-powered weapons were then designed on the tricorder model. However, the Zorch launcher and Phasing Zorcher were modified again toward the end of the design phase to have a more distinctive look.