Chex Quest | Hacker News Reader

Chex Quest

chocolate-doom.org

56 pointstkuraku29 comments

> The game is notable for the fact that it was the first game CD-ROM to be released inside a cereal box. Sales of Chex cereal increased by 295% in incremental volume over base and 48% in volume share during this promotion.[1] Much of the manufacturing cost of the CDs was paid for by America Online. AOL was allowed to include its dial-up online service client on the disc in exchange for this contribution.

If you weren't around then this may be hard to believe but I cannot overstate how ubiquitous was the distribution of AOL CD-ROMs. They were everywhere. It felt like you couldn't open a magazine without one falling out. You'd stumble upon them on the sidewalk. AOL must have stamped a billion of the damn things. (Edit: I was afraid I might be exaggerating but apparently it really may have been a billion. https://www.vox.com/2015/5/12/8594049/aol-free-trial-cds)

About 5 years ago I was pacing the Knoxville marathon and toward the end it was just me and a college student, maybe she was twenty, and somehow I brought up AOL. She'd never heard of it. She'd never heard of CD-ROMs. I was like, so there was this movie called You've Got Mail[1]. She hadn't heard of that either. I felt really old.

1. 1998 movie where AOL is a plot element. If you're up for a romcom that's a nice time capsule of the late 90s, you could do worse. Also has PowerBook G3s and the sound of modems.

I was in college during peak AOL CDs. I literally covered an entire wall of my dorm room with AOL CDs (shiny side out). It impressed the nerds.

There was a commercial my family and I used to love back in either the late 90s or early 2000s (I was probably 10 at most, so I don't remember exactly) where a couple was super excited to be receiving an advertisement CD rom, and they rushed to open it...and put it into the last remaining slot of a giant tower they had constructed from hundreds of them that I believe was shaped like a fish. The other funny part my siblings and parents and I liked was when they got to the part of the commercial actually advertising something and taglines were showing up on the screen and the couple broke the fourth wall and commented on them ("Oh look honey, 'dramatically cut spam'!"). I tried to mention this to my girlfriend a while back, since we're almost exactly the same age and a lot of memorable commercials from our childhoods overlapped, but she had no idea what I was talking about, and I couldn't find it (or even any mention of it) online anywhere.

Doesn't ring any bells but https://old.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/ may be able to figure it out for you.

I'm old enough to remember free AOL floppy disks. (I'm actually pretty sure I know where one still sits unopened in a drawer).

The free floppys were better than cds because you could wipe them and have a perfectly usable disk.

Why hasn't anyone tried this today? Or like, with flashdrive or some other modern equivalent? It seems like it would be a great way to get your product to literally everyone if you had the VC money

Please let's not normalize plugging random media you got in the mail into your computer.

Most people use phones

QR codes are the closest thing

Never heard of CD-ROMs? Maybe the term was unfamiliar compared to just CD?

I have a hard time believing any young person really hasn't heard of CDs, if not handled them.

I think she'd heard of CDs but didn't know they could be used for anything other than music.

I literally used them for coasters.

Used ribbons to hang them from our fruit trees to keep the birds off.

Ooh, yeah, I bet that would have worked great for deer too.

This is unexpected and amazing, because I was just showing my wife this game a couple weeks ago.

I remember getting it in a Chex cereal box as a kid, and my brothers and I played it a ton. Then in high school, I stumbled upon a new disc copy of it at Re-PC (computer recycler in Seattle). Then I stumbled upon it again just recently on Steam. I can't escape it. HN was the last place I would expect to see this. How funny.

It's just as I remember it! And exactly what you would expect for free in a cereal box from the 90s, but in the best way possible.

Angry Video Game Nerd has a great video on Chex Quest, in which he concedes that it's actually a surprisingly good game for its time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg0y9i5E7nY

If you want to play Chex Quest in your browser, it's hosted on the Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Chex_Quest_1996

There's a modern version available for free on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/804270/Chex_Quest_HD/

Unfortunately that doesn't work on Linux.

Given its ProtonDB rating, it seems likely it'd run well enough. https://www.protondb.com/app/804270

I just love being teleported to my childhood on HN every so often. Didn't think I'd ever see Chex Quest on here! Also I'm very pleasantly surprised they did a 2020 re-release (?) but of course I only learned about it just now.

I highly recommend that everyone should check out Chex Quest 3[0], created by Charles Jacobi[1], who is the lead artist for the original Chex Quest games. It's a compilation of the first two games with an additional third episode. One minor note is that it was developed to be run on more modern source ports (e.g. G/ZDoom), unlike the original game which ran a modified version of the Final Doom engine.[2]

Doom 1/2 has a very rich history and I love to see posts like these get attention.

[0] - https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Chex_Quest_3

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Caf%C3%A9

[2] - https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Chex_Quest#Engine

Chex Quest wasn't the only Doom promo, I recently learned about Kick soda Doom: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Kick_Attack! It was a one level promotional thing made for a mountain dew soda ripoff. It's really bad, lol.

Thirteen year old me got incedibly nauseous playing this game. Good times!

This is great :D

I played Chex Quest as a kid! I never even played the original DOOM. Crazy how that all worked out.

Wow, I had forgotten until now about this game that I must have got from a cereal box as a child and played for countless hours.

I recommend using crispy-doom instead of chocolate-doom to play. https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/Crispy_Doom

The latest dsda-doom with its new indexed lighting emulation is awesome. It's fully hardware accelerated but the indexed lighting mode almost perfectly emulates the lighting and palette effects of the original software renderer. Basically you get the best of both worlds, super fast framerate and high resolution but classic looks. It's worth checking out: https://github.com/kraflab/dsda-doom

Was there ever a multiplayer mod for this game? It was pretty awesome.

Of course.

https://youtu.be/gbr37vZvoGM?t=41

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