Lost Mario Browser Games for McDonalds Toy Promotion

Hopefully, you hear back from them.

I don't know why it didn't occur to me before, but there's a good chance that the "great game developer in Chicago" is most likely Creata, the same company that made the Mario games. They have a location in Chicago.

www.creata.com/location/chicago/


Regarding the Mario games, while this isn't much of an update, I found this Mario GIF that I'm pretty sure was used in one of the Mario flash games. It's a series of renders that were apparently used for the Mario Golf 64 Japanese soundtrack, according to this page. While my memory could be faulty, I really think these renders might have been used for the Mario's Driving Range game, too. The 3-D render look, the posing and the stiff animation all line up with what I remember Mario looking like in the game.



Something I noticed that it's not unusual for these promotional browser games to use existing assets. This lost Yoshi flash game uses various promotional images made for the Yoshi's Island DS game. I think there's a good chance Nintendo provided Creata/McDonalds these images for the game.

I'm almost certain Mario was the only playable character in the Driving Range game. I don't remember the Jammin' with Mario game very well, but I don't think you really play as Mario in that one. I think he's just a background element while you play music on the keyboard.

Regarding swfchan, I've been looking into the idea of using a virtual machine. They let you run another operating system on your computer from what I gather. A computer inside of another computer, essentially. While it's not 100% foolproof, if the virtual machine gets infected, it most likely won't affect your actual computer. I'm clearing space off my computer and I'm going to try downloading the swfchan files through a virtual machine once I get everything figured out.

Unfortunately, the swfchan files weren't related to the games. The "Mario Golf.swf" didn't even seem to be actually related to Mario at all. It was barely over 1 MB so whatever it was meant to be probably wasn't saved properly. I used the swf decompiler and I see references to "Mochi Coins" and "Alchemy Game" so it seems to be a game of some kind, but the swf doesn't run at all and it doesn't seem to have any images. 

There ended up being two Jammin.swf files on the site. They were just looped clips of Tom and Jerry and House M.D. with music playing over them. Nothing related to Mario.

I kind of figured these files wouldn't lead to much, but I figured it was worth a shot, anyway.

Somewhat related, but I was messing around with the Wayback Machine and looking at some of the other promotions that played around the time the Mario one was on-going and I found a Pirates of the Caribbean Happy Meal site that is set up very similar to the Mario site. It has sections for games, polls, and "cool stuff," just like the Mario site. Much like how the Mario site was, the pirates site archive is mostly nonfunctional. Curious, I downloaded the swf for the home page and looked through the code. It was set up very similar to the Mario version so I was able to find references to the Pirate games fairly easily. Games by the name of "Treasure Caves," "Word Jumble," and "Raging Ship Puzzle" were referenced in the code. While the Mario games had a few references on random message boards from around the time, I couldn't find any references to these Pirate games on Google, so they may very well be even more obscure. I'm not familiar with Pirates of the Caribbean or these games, but it does make me wonder; how many other lost and forgotten flash games were hosted on sites like this?

Here's the link to the Pirates site for anyone curious:
web.archive.org/web/20060720084244/http://www.happymeal.com/potc/

Yeah, it's unfortunate. I think the best thing we can do now is try to spread awareness about these lost games. I made a post on the r/Mario Reddit, asking if anyone remember these games, but unsurprisingly, it didn't get any responses. I also made a couple posts on the lost media reddit, one mentioning them being lost and another asking about the Creata lead I found. On the latter, a few people responded, suggesting I reach out to DidYouKnowGaming and BlameItOnJorge. I reached out to BlameItOnJorge by email, but got no response. I assume he's either busy or uninterested. Someone with a following like his probably gets tons of requests about lost media coverage. I haven't reached out to DidYouKnowGaming yet. The fact that someone did make a video bringing light to this forum post makes me think there will be others who are interested in finding these games.

I think it's possible somebody could have saved the swf files for these games, though I think that's also unlikely. I think most of the people who played these games would have been kids and most likely wouldn't have the foresight or the know-how to download these games. I know I didn't. Plus, the games weren't available for very long, so I imagine there wasn't much of a chance for many people to play them.

While it's not ideal, I thought about trying to have someone make a recreation of the games. Since I don't remember all the details, I'm considering reaching out to the people who made the forum posts about the games and ask them if they remember any details about them. Though that also has a couple issues. One, it's so long ago that these users might not remember much, if anything at all. Two, it seems the users that mentioning played the games haven't been active on those forums for years. 

Maybe one day, some sort of information will come out about these games. Maybe videos or screenshots on someone's online page like that guy who posted those images of your Shrek games.

On another note, for anyone curious about the Mario/Happy Meal screensaver I uploaded, I uploaded a short video on Reddit showing off the screensaver. Thought this would be useful for those curious but didn't feel like downloading it.

Yes! I've heard of these! I remember playing some of the games on the Mario Hoops website back in the day. I think Superstar Shootout was archived, but I didn't realize Dribble Skillz wasn't. The Mario Party 6 website was really cool. You were in a woods area (I think) and it even had original music, I believe. It would cycle between day and night and you could collect on orbs to find game info and even play simplified versions of the mini-games in your browser. I feel like that site was archived. I know there is a video for it.

A lot of Nintendo's games at the time had these interactive sites that promoted the games with browser games and other things. The Nintendo Arcade page helped link to all these browser games in one place. I'm kind of surprised there isn't more people looking for these games, but I imagine there probably isn't many leads and Nintendo isn't likely to release them, especially with Flash being discontinued. I remember some of these websites, like the Yoshi Island DS one, were excluded from the Wayback Machine, which is really strange. I kind of wish Nintendo still did websites like these.

It would be cool if the Happy Meal games were on the Nintendo Arcade at some point. Though, like you said, they weren't really tied to a specific game, so that might not be too likely.

The Mario Net Quest browser game that was found was on an non-indexed webpage on a Mario fan site for years before being discovered. Maybe somewhere on the internet, some of these games exist on a page Google can't find.

EDIT: I guess Nintendo still occasionally does fun things for their websites. I found that the Luigi's Mansion 3 site has an "Image Creator" which is supposed to "goo"-ify a photo of yourself. I wonder what things these newer websites could have while they're still available.

Looks like a lot of these old flash sites don't function well on Wayback. Nice searching, though! Weird that the Gamecube Mario Golf site doesn't go past the loading screen, but interestingly enough, I was able to download the swf and decompile it and see what the main page looks like!

What caught my eye is there's an option called Driving Range. Upon further research though, I think this tab most likely refers to a Driving Range mode in the game. I wasn't able to really open any of these links. I could look further into the swf, but I mainly saw fonts and character names in the files. I tried decompiling the swf for the GBA site but it was mainly images and text you can see on the site as-is, so there doesn't seem to be anything interesting in that one as far as I can tell.

It does seem like a waste for Nintendo to only use Mario's Driving Range for one website, so it does make me wonder if it would be hidden on one of these sites. The render/animation I posted earlier seems to be from the N64 era. It's probably unlikely, but I wonder if the game could possibly be older than we thought and be on an old N64 site? I'm probably reaching here, but we could look into that.