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The Death of Food Video Game Tie-Ins
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Aug 12, 2025
Calling all video gaming fans! Today we are examining the history of the synergistic fusion of snack and fast food companies in video games! ...Did you ever play Donald Land? How about 'Chester Cheetah too Cool to Fool'?. These collaborations went on for decades, and continue to this day with eSports! Come with us as we look at how it all began!
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Today, we're dusting off the cartridge of a long-forgotten marketing fad to find out
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whatever happened to food tie-in video games. In 1977, American gaming company Atari put out
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the Atari 2600 gaming console and, in 1982, it graced the homes of over 15 million families
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It didn't take long for other industries to take notice of the video game craze
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Suddenly, the home console market was flooded with tie-in video games. 1983 saw the release of Kool-Aid Man for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision
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It was also… terrible. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that they busted through a marketing barrier and got the Kool-Aid name
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directly in front of kids. As the 80s wound down, Nintendo was the new king of consoles and their NES was selling
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like hotcakes. It wasn't until 1990 that Americans finally got to play a food tie-in game on their NES
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That game was Yo-Noid. Yo! Noid had players control Domino's Pizza's bizarre mascot, the Noid
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In 1992, they debuted MC Kids, which was basically a Super Mario Bros. ripoff with McDonald's
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mascots and logos abound. Cheetos was the next food brand to give this whole video game thing a
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try. Chester Cheetah Too Cool to Fool and Chester Cheetah Wild Wild Quest were released for the SNES
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and Genesis in 1992 and 1993. Also in 1993, the 7-Up tie-in Cool Spot was released for the SNES
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and Genesis By the mid the Nintendo 64 original PlayStation and Sega Dreamcast were the new IT consoles to beat and PC games were rolling out in droves as computers became more easily accessible
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In 1996, the beloved ChexQuest first-person shooter took over every kid's computer
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ChexQuest was the first video game to come as a cereal box prize. It was so popular that it won
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awards for advertising effectiveness and promotional achievement, and spurred a whole trend of cereal box games, like Captain Crunch's Crunchling Adventure, in which players took care
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of a fuzzy little creature and fed it heaps of Captain Crunch cereal. 1999's Pepsi Man was a 3D
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action game based on the titular Japanese mascot. In 2006, Microsoft put out Sneak King for their
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new Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles, but the major breakout star of 2000's video game food tie-ins
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were Doritos and Mountain Dew. Call of Duty and Halo branding could often be found on bags of
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Doritos, while Mountain Dew had been putting Master Chief on cans and bottles for years
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Today, we're seeing far fewer food tie-in video games. What was once a thriving cottage industry
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has been abandoned in favor of big esports sponsorships and the resurgence of real-world
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items like cereal boxes and chip bags. It's much easier and more cost-effective for food
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companies to slap their logo on a costume or collectible than it is to commission an entirely
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new branded game. There's still the occasional outlier, like I love you, Colonel Sanders
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the 2019 KFC dating simulator that allows players to romance the Colonel
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But these sorts of projects have become the exception rather than the rule
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