Chex Quest, a non-violent first-person shooter video game created in 1996 and released in 1997 by Digital Café, was a video game originally intended as a Chex cereal promotion aimed at children aged 6–9 and up.Thompson, Stephanie. "WatersMolitor Promo Links Chex and AOL." Adweek - Midwest Edition. 10 February 1997.Sloane, Martin. "Cereal offer provides good fun." The Vindicator. Wednesday August 13, 1997. C2. It is a total conversion of the more explicitly violent video game Doom (specifically The Ultimate Doom version of the game). Chex Quest won both a Golden EFFIE Award for Advertising EffectivenessVale, Heather; Comm, Joel. Closed Door Session #5 - EXPERT: Michael Koenigs. Closed Door Session DVD Series. 2008. and Golden Reggie Award for Promotional Achievement in 1998.Hyers, Dean. Digital Café Projects . DeanHyers.com.Reggie Awards Case Studies: Reggie Gold Award Winners - Chex Quest. Promotional Marketing Association. 1998. It is known today for having been the first video game ever to be included as a cereal box prize.Freeman, Laurie. "Special Report - Events & Promotions: Premium Giveaway Products Pass Cost-Benefit Analyses." Advertising Age. Pg.S-4. 17 March 1997. The game's cult followingSharkey, Scott. The 37 Best Free PC Games: Chex Quest 3. GamePro. 2 March 2011. has been described as being composed of unusually devoted fans of an advertising vehicle from a bygone age.Lahti, Evan. Backspace - Chex Quest: Never Forget. PC Gamer. No.190. Pg.96. August 2009.Molitor, Dori. Return of the Flemoids . Hub Magazine. July 2008.PC Gamer staff. PC Gamer Panel - PAX 2010: The Five Wonders of PC Gaming . (audio available ). PC Gamer. 8 September 2010.
In 2019, General Mills re-released Chex Quest, as well as its previously unofficial 2008 sequel, and produced a mini-documentary available on YouTube.Apple News/Food & Wine Magazine May 24th 2019.
Gameplay
Originally based on the Doom engine, the gameplay present in Chex Quest is substantially identical to its predecessor. The game is played in a first person perspective with the player character navigating through quasi-3D environments while enemies attempt to attack and immobilize him. Along the way, various cereal-themed power-ups, weapons, and ammunition can be found that can boost the player character's health and make him better able to counterattack or flee his enemies. When the final boss is defeated in the last level, the game is won.
A few notable differences from Doom are evident, however, regarding enemy profiles (specifically the loss of long-range attacks in low-level enemies and the loss of movement in high-level enemies) and the number of levels in each world (restricted to 5 levels in Chex Quest).Take That, Orphan Annie!. The Buffalo News. 10 August 1997.
Plot Set on a distant planet named Bazoik, the game follows the Chex Warrior, a soldier clad in a Chex-shaped suit of armor, as he foils the invasion of the planet by the 'Flemoids': a species of slimy, green invertebrates, who have infested the planet and captured many helpless colonists, whom the Chex Warrior must save. His main weapons are devices called "zorchers", which teleports his enemies to their home dimension. The game starts at the landing pad of the research center on Bazoik; other levels include the laboratory, the arboretum, and finally, the caverns of Bazoik, where the Flemoids have established their colony. Their principal weapon is the use of mucus as a projectile.
Development
Produced with a small team of developers on a budget of around $500,000, Chex Quest was created by the WatersMolitor promotion agency, which had been hired by Ralston Foods to promote the Chex cereal brand. 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 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. The game would be a high-quality program whose normal retail value would be between $30 and $35. However, it would be offered to consumers for free with no increase to the cost of the cereal box.
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 then-recent release of Quake. Chex Quest was the first foray into professional game development for lead artist Charles Jacobi and programmer Scott Holman, though both had previously modified 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. Indeed, the game has been recognized for having a sense of humor about its identity and origins.Plante, Chris. The Forgotten First-Person Shooters You Need to Play: Chex Quest . UGO. (reprinted at 1up.com ) 24 September 2010.
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 Doomguy's face in the Doom status bar. Because time was limited, preexisting 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.
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. Zorch weapons were also originally going to "neutralize" flemoids with nutritional foods like banana slices, milk, and strawberries, but due to Ralston's worries that this might encourage food fighting, this was changed so that the zorcher emitted pink light and "sent back" the flemoids to their own dimension, making them vanish. Early designs for the Chex Warrior also had his head and body all as one giant Chex piece. However, this was changed due to aesthetic similarities to the M&M's animated characters. The flemoids were originally yellow, but this was changed to green due to limitations in the Doom color palette.Jacobi, Charles. Chex Quest 1 Concepts! Chucktropolis. Retrieved 1 February 2013.
Additional development team members include: Producer Kimberly Hyers, Technical Coordinator Dave Brus, and Project Manager Mary Bregi.Info provided by Creative Director
Promotion In support of the promotion, coupons and advertisements were included in newspapers and magazines with total circulation of forty-two million; promotional art was added to the front of all boxes containing the game; a 30-second television advertisement was broadcast; and a website (chexquest.com) was launched to present game tips, Chex recipes, and further plot details such as character biographies. To cut down on development costs, WatersMolitor formed a promotional partnership with America Online who actually manufactured the C.D.s in exchange for which all copies of Chex Quest came bundled with the AOL software and a "50 Free Hours" subscription offer. WatersMolitor also created a telephone help-line for gamers who encountered problems with the gameGaw, Jonathan. Business: Chew on this - Chex will put CD-ROM in cereal; $5 million high- tech promotion comes as General Mills takes over brand. Star Tribune. 31 January 1997. and hired fledgling new media company, Digital Café, to provide coding, plot, animations, original music and art for the game.
Comparison with Doom Some parameters used to start Doom are also used to start Chex Quest. Despite Chex Quest's major changes from its predecessor, there are still a few remaining relics (e.g. levels from other Ultimate Doom episodes and some in-game text).
While Doom has a cheat code scheme in which every cheat starts with "id", the codes in Chex Quest are based on the names of the people in the production crew of the game, with a few exceptions.Chex Quest Cheats & Codes . IGN. 2012. PC speaker sound effects from the MS-DOS version of Doom have been modified and are used in Chex Quest. Whereas Doom is rated M for Mature, Chex Quest was made to be a child-friendly game for all audiences. Nearly all of the graphics and audio from Doom have been replaced, from textures to enemies to weapons.
Left-over levels Chex Quest has only the first five levels from The Ultimate Doom converted for the game. Some left-over levels are playable (as Chex Quest conversions) only via the level warp parameter at startup.Foster, Neil. Chex Quest . Hardcore Gaming 101. 13 February 2014. These left-over levels include maps 6 through 9 from episode 1 as well as all maps in episodes 2, 3 and 4. In these levels the music reverts to the original score from Ultimate Doom. After the level warp parameter is used to access maps E3M1 or E4M1, the remainder of the levels (through map 5) within the episode selected can be accessed by completing the levels in the episode in order (just as with the standard level progression in Doom or Chex Quest). Unfortunately, bugs prevent any of the other levels from launching upon completion of the level before it, and similarly E4M9 cannot be reached from E4M2 as previously. Completion of E2M5 (via either exit) displays the end graphic originally displayed at the end of The Shores Of Hell, the second episode of the original Doom, and completing E3M5 displays the end sequence from Inferno, the third episode. Likewise, completing E4M5 displays the end graphic from Thy Flesh Consumed, the fourth and final episode of The Ultimate Doom. Both of the latter two end sequences feature a decapitated rabbit named Daisy.
Episode intermission texts which originally (i.e. in Doom) were displayed upon completion of E1M8, E2M8, E3M8, and E4M8 are now found in modified form for Chex Quest. Thus completion of E1M5 in Chex Quest now displays the new message: "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. ARE YOU PREPARED FOR THE NEXT MISSION? PRESS THE ESCAPE KEY TO CONTINUE..." Completion of the left-over level E2M5 displays the message: "YOU'VE DONE IT!" which never appears in The Ultimate Doom. Likewise, the episode intermission text displayed upon completion of E3M5 reads: "WONDERFUL JOB!", and that displayed upon completion of E4M5 reads: "FANTASTIC" again neither of which ever appeared in the original game. Charles Jacobi has said that there were never any plans to produce more than five levels and that he knew Scott Holman, another programmer, ran through the text strings and changed any that seemed inappropriate, without knowing where they went.