Giant Robot Invasion!

I’m a big fan of breakfast cereal. It’s easy to throw together and there’s no cooking involved. (A surefire way to get me to pass on food is to force me to cook it.) As a kid I ate a bunch of sugary crap before school – Corn Pops, Fruity Pebbles, Lucky Charms, et cetera. Okay, TECHNICALLY, they were cheap bag cereals that mimicked the popular brands, but who cared? Well, the Anal Patrol did. Once I said “less” instead of “fewer”, so I got community service.

Because I usually picked Reese’s for breakfast, Chex cereal never really excited me. Oh, sure, Chex Mix is great, but you need the nuts and pretzels to carry that snack. Chex cereal itself is pretty unremarkable. I don’t know when they introduced the flavored variants, but when I was growing up, we had wheat, corn, and rice flavors. They all tasted like the same flavor – “bland”. To this date I don’t know anyone who ate Chex without dumping something good in there. I even knew someone who ate it with concrete. (It killed him, but now children can draw on his corpse with chalk.)

But the guys behind Chex must’ve realized that their cereal sucked, because in 1996, they introduced one of the best marketing ploys cereal has ever seen. It was a monumental success and sold lots of Chex. I should know – I bought some when it was going on. After all, who can resist buying cereal that comes with a FREE computer game?

Enter Chex Quest.

Now, at first glance, Chex Quest looks like a stupid idea. I’ll give you that. And the awful 3D intro cinematic certainly doesn’t help. When you start a new game, it leads you inside a space station where a meeting of the…ahem, Intergalactic Federation of Cereals is being held. Yeah, that’s a good start, ain’t it? And the members all have bodies that resemble various bits of cereal. That’s why when a certain alarm goes off someone yells, “Oh, SHIT, the Trix Rabbit found a way inside!”

Anyway, the cereal people are discussing a new threat, which began when a volcano exploded and tossed some rocks into space. These rocks contain the larvae of slime monsters called Flemoids. When exposed to nutritional substance, they grow to full size – that’s why they’ve invaded the Nutritional Development Facility on a planet called Bazoik. (By the way, who’s the genius that came up with a name like Bazoik? “And here to name this newly discovered planet is my good friend, Gerald McBoing-Boing.”)

A scientist comes in and explains that the Flemoids can’t be harmed by their “zorchers”, but by recalibrating them, they can teleport the Flemoids back to their home dimension. It’s a pretty flimsy excuse to dodge violence, but no one cared. Kids still probably thought they were killing a whole room of Flemoids with their rapid-fire zorcher. Really, if kids are going to think that anyway, why bother censoring it? You’re not killing people, you’re blowing up Nickelodeon slime.

Of course, rather than deploy an entire army, they need one lone soldier to waltz into Bazoik and take care of business. Well, this is a Chex game, after all. Who better to risk his life than a guy called the Chex Warrior?

So, yeah. It doesn’t look good so far. But the reason this marketing tactic worked so well is that Chex Quest was based off an already popular game. You see, Chex Quest is actually a modified version of Ultimate Doom. That’s right. It’s Doom for kids. The demons were changed into Flemoids and the weapons were changed into zorchers, but it still functions like Doom. The zorchers still act like Doom weapons, so it’s fun to pick up a badass zorcher and toast fools with it. Let’s face it – if U.S. soldiers got zorchers during Vietnam, hippies would’ve asked Santa for a draft letter.

So you go through all five levels of the facility and eventually take down a wall of slime blocking off other cereal people stuck on the planet. When you rescue them, the ending starts to play. Strangely, it’s not rendered in 3D – it uses animated stills that spin and stretch. Did they run out of their budget or something? Maybe they had to hire new staff. After all, if you don’t clear the annual Russian roulette tournament, why bother paying you?

But what you’re waiting for is after the ending – the game directs you to www.chexquest.com, where you could then download the free sequel, Chex Quest 2. It continued the storyline by trailing Chex Warrior back to his homeworld, where he has to fight off another invading Flemoid threat. Don’t these slime monsters have anything better to do? Maybe not, if the only TV show in your home dimension is called BLAHKGAKABLECKABLAH.

And even THEN, the tale wasn’t over. In 2008, two members of the original Chex Quest development team came out with Chex Quest 3. Not only did it conclude the adventure once and for all, but it updated the first two games with a bunch of new options. You have to admit, that’s one hell of a nice surprise. A series that has been dead for years, receiving a sequel out of the blue? It feels like you’re a kid all over again. (I know how it feels – I repeated third grade five times before I left the time loop.)

Here’s a speedrun of the first game instead of my normal screenshots, which totally doesn’t mean I had to finish this blog post at the last minute and couldn’t spend a lot of time on screenshots. No.

Chex Quest was a brilliant marketing tactic that proved to be fun for adults as well as kids. Not only did it sell a lot of Chex, but it inspired two sequels and a dedicated community that uses the game to create their own maps. With that kind of impact, Chex Quest definitely deserves a place in gaming history. I only hope that more breakfast cereals look at Chex Quest and try making their own awesome promotional games. Just imagine it. Tony the Tiger Football! Count Chocula’s Haunting Adventure! Or my personal favorite – Oh SHIT, The Trix Rabbit Is Inside The Facility!

Click here to get to the download page for Chex Quest 3, which contains all three Chex Quest games in one package.

(Chex and Chex Quest is copyrighted to General Mills and other respective parties. Video from YouTube user needateleporterhere.)

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