Lost Mario Browser Games for McDonalds Toy Promotion

I appreciate the suggestion! Luckily, I already had a SATA cable which is how I was able to get the screensaver off of my drive. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find swf files related to the games I was looking for. Using the Everything tool, I was excited for a moment when I saw a folder called marioGolf.swf under a happymeal.com folder, but it only contains a 1 KB file called marioGolfStore.sol. Opening it in a text editor shows jumbled text and text that reads "my_highscore," so I'm assuming the file was meant to save my score in the game. The file was saved 9/9/2006 which aligns with when I could've played the games.

Interestingly, I was able to find .sol files for other games under several happymeal.com folders! These must've been games I played on the website at the time, but forgot about. These very well may be lost media, too! I'll include a list of folders and the dates they were saved. Even though some of the folder names have ".swf" at the end of their names, they all contain only .sol files and no .swf files.

am-idol/swf/games/blobs.swf/Blobsstorage.sol 5/5/2007
en_US/swf/main.swf/TestMoviw_Config_Info.sol 7/21/2007
mario/swf/mario/marioGolf.swf/marioGolfStore.sol 9/9/2006
mario/swf/mario/marioGolf.swf/marioGolfStore.sol 1/10/2007
mermaid-bionicle/swf/bionicle/bionicleBreakit.swf/bionicleBreakitstorage.sol 10/11/2006
shrek/swf/main.swf/TestMovie_Config_Info.sol 5/11/2007

flushedaway/swf/flushedaway/brickBreaker.swf/store.sol 12/16/2006
flushedaway/swf/flushedaway/plumbing.swf/plumbing_store.sol 11/3/2006
flushedaway/swf/flushedaway/soccer.swf/store.sol
happymeal/swf/cosmicSurvivor.swf/CosmicSurvivorstorage.sol 1/11/2007
hotwheels-barbie/swf/hotwheels/HotWheelRacer.swf/store.sol 10/21/2006

Even though I wasn't able to find the games, I greatly appreciate the suggestion! I feel like it's possible the swf files were saved on my computer at some point, but probably got deleted for one reason or another.

I mainly just looked at the ones that were dated around 2006-2007, the time the games would've been active. Most of them turned out to be random ads my browser saved like Nike and credit card ads.

This sounds like a good idea. I'm not really familiar with CDNs, but I did some googling and I think I understand what they are? How were you able to find your Guitar Hero sites with a CDN?

As a side note, I've also been looking into foreign versions of happymeal.com on the Wayback Machine (such as happymeal.com.au) to see if the games might have been hosted and archived on one of those.

I've been thinking about that screensaver file and how I thought it had screen showing a cheat code for Mario's Driving Range on it. It makes me wonder if that screen may have had images of the Mario's Driving Range game on it. If I could somehow get to that screen, that may be a way for us to finally see screenshots of the game.

Like I said before, it's possible I misremembered the screen being on there, but I started thinking, maybe something specific has to trigger the screen? Before, I had waited for 20 minutes for the secret screen to show, but it never did. Does anyone think it's possible something else may have triggered the screen to appear? Like maybe you have to view the screensaver at a certain date and time or something?

When the screensaver is active, I can right-click the screensaver and see a box that says "About Adobe Flash Player 9," so the screensaver seems to be made with Flash. If I could somehow get the flash content out of the screensaver file, I should, in theory, be able to decompile that file with the Flash decompiler I had used before and see for sure if that secret screen was on there or not.

I'm kind of stuck though, because I have no idea how I would be able to extract data from a screensaver file. The screensaver comes in the form of an exe installer. I can open the .exe file using 7-Zip and see some of the contents of the exe file. Inside of it is the actual screensaver file (called "MarioScreensaver.scr"), some folders with files such as InstallOptions.dll and ioSpecial.ini and modern-wizard.bmp (which is an image file that I think the uninstaller program uses). Clicking on Install Options.dll brings up more files including uninst.exe (the uninstaller), .data, .rdata, .reloc, and .text. There is a folder called .rsrc. Opening it brings up a DIALOG folder with a single file inside called 101. I'm not sure what I can do with any of these files.

Does anyone have any idea how I could be able to extract the flash content from this screensaver? I'm a bit out of my element here. I don't know if what I'm trying to do would even be possible. Any help is appreciated!

Also, here's the image file, modern-wizard.bmp, that I mentioned earlier. I converted it to .png format so I could upload it easier.




Screensaver download link

Glad the recreation is in the works! It’s looking good so far. I think this will definitely help to jog the memories of anyone else who had played it and bring more awareness to the search for these games.

For anyone still interested in this search, I just found something pretty cool! I discovered the LOGO for the lost Mario's Driving Range game!

Turns out, I did remember correctly when I talked about the easter egg in the screensaver file. I remembered there being a secret screen that would show up on the screensaver if you waited long enough. It would give you a password to get to a later level in Mario's Driving Range. Turns out, there is a second requirement to get the screen to show up. One I didn't realize until now. Turns out, your computer's date has to be set in September of 2006, the month the promotion first started!

I got the idea when I noticed the top-right of the screensaver advertised happymeal.com having "New stuff every Friday." So I tried setting my computer back to September 1, 2006, the first Friday of September for that year. I didn't have much hope, but it turns out it works! After you set the time back, all you have to do is wait around 20 seconds after the screensaver starts and you'll get a new screen!

Apparently, there was another screen that simply advertised the "Take the Mario Challenge" promotion and encouraged kids to exercise and make their own "game" using the Happy Meal toys. I discovered this one first, but the second one is a lot more interesting!




It seems that if you set the date to September 1-7th, it shows the above screen, but if you set the date to September 8-13th, it shows a new screen with the Mario's Driving Range cheat code I remembered! Turns out I did misremember the actual password. I thought it was just "Happy Meal," but it turns out to be "Happymealmario." Most interesting of all is the LOGO for the game! This is probably the closest existing image we have of the game! I was hoping changing the computer to other dates would reveal more screens (and possibly even mention the Jammin' with Mario game), but no luck so far. Nothing seems to happen when I set the dates to September 14 and 15, but I might try more dates later.



EDIT: Here are links to the images:

Take the Mario Challenge

Mario's Driving Range

It’s so nice seeing this because I was planning on making a post asking if there had been any updates. The logos are a big find! I took both of them and did a quick reverse image search to see if I could find any matches but Mario’s Driving Range brought up images relating to the Mario Golf games, understandably so, and Jammin with Mario just brought up a bunch of random Mario related images. Could be worth a closer look though, just to be sure I didn’t miss anything.

Has any more progress been made with the Mario’s Driving Range recreation?