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Ask Joystiq: Chex Quest, He-Man and broken 360 gamepads
Making up for last week's barren edition, today's Ask Joystiq is a little heftier. Topics covered include He-Man and Day of the Tentacle, Chex Quest, PS2 boxes, broken Xbox 360 controllers and region downloading (again). If you have any burning questions, unsolved gaming mysteries, or just a desire for musings from our knowledgeable cadre of writers, drop us a line at ask AAT joystiq DAWT com (and yes, we write it that way for a reason).Q: Do any of you remember the 1997 PC game "Chex Quest"? When I was 9 I got it in a box of chex cereal and thought it was amazing. Recently my 5 year old cousin came over to my house and told us about a game with chex and cheerios and "zorch". Amazingly enough he had been playing Chex Quest on his friends computer! What ever happened to quality games being released in cereal boxes?- Curtis C.The question here is more rhetorical than anything, but once we learned more about this game we absolutely needed to post about it. In 1996 a small newmedia company called Digital Café created Chex Quest, a Chex-themed first-person-shooter that has the esteemed honor of being the first video game ever distributed for free through cereal boxes. If that alone wasn't cool enough, Chex Quest was actually a total conversion of id's Ultimate Doom, meaning that cereal-munching munchkins were playing a re-skinned version of the violent revolutionary series just two years after the height of its controversy. According to the Chex Quest wiki, the inclusion of the game helped increase sales of Chex cereals by over 200%, and it won several awards for promotional achievement.Chex Quest has since been made freeware (PC only), and can be found for download here. As for releasing quality games in cereal boxes, we're all for it. If indie games can be distributed along with trendy t-shirts, we see no reason why indie developers can't strike similar deals with Kellogg's. Get on it, guys!- Scott Jon Siegel
