
No, you're not reading that headline incorrectly – fast food giant McDonald's has just released a Game Boy Color game in the Year of Our Lord, 2023.
Developed by Krool Toys, Grimace's Birthday launched yesterday via its own website. You can play the game in your browser, but the game itself was built to function on Nintendo's 1998 handheld – and the ROM image has been dumped online, so you can do just that.
The game is a platformer which sees the return of McDonaldland characters Grimace, Birdie the Early Bird, Hamburgular and the McNugget Buddies, all to mark the arrival of the 'Grimace's Birthday ice cream shake' product served at U.S. McDonald's restaurants.
The game is the work of GumpyFunction (Tom Lockwood) and Pearacidic (Bryan Taylor), both of whom have worked on 'modern' Game Boy games in the past. You can read about how it was made here.
You can download the ROM file from here.


McDonald’s and video games have a pretty long relationship. Japanese studio Treasure created McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure for the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis in the '90s, while Virgin Interactive released Global Gladiators with Golden Arches branding. More recently, McDonald's in China gave away a Chicken Nugget Tetris handheld.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 17
Dang, it's actually pretty cool.
I downloaded the ROM directly from the website via DevTools, loaded it up on my Everdrive, and gave it a spin on my GBA.
And it works! Pretty cool stuff, looks well made too.
When you visit the website, the browser downloads this file:
https://grimacesbirthday.com/bX4TvUeiUEfKRw8bkPGaB
When downloaded, it saves a 1024 KB .msi file, but when renamed to .gbc will work on GBC emulators and flashcarts.
Edit: The original link was removed and changed to https://grimacesbirthday.com/bX4TvUeiUEfKRw8bkPGaB.gb, which also has a new hash meaning it's likely an updated ROM.
Even I have limits, and I play anything with a pulse if it's on gbc.
@RupeeClock And here's another, related bit of trivia: It's called GBDAYTEST in the header
@Agent_P
I can't wait to read the article on The Cutting Room Floor.
Edit: One actually exists.
https://tcrf.net/Grimace%27s_Birthday
This is a legitimately fun game, even in free skate mode, I recommend y'all here give it a go.
@RupeeClock I'ma need to edit it to feature the internal name
Edit: Ugh, how the heck do I prevent TE and all related sites to stop changing the emoticons into emoji?
@RupeeClock This your twitter?
@Agent_P
Huh, yeah that's my Twitter. I don't really use it much other than browsing.
@RupeeClock Got curious to see if you were elsewhere, lol
The first video game I ever made featured Ronald, Grimace, and the rest of the gang as villains. You played as a kid and had to stop them from sacrificing the other children to summon Satan.
I was around eight years old at the time. It was not a very good game, no. But I like to think it was a more faithful depiction of Grimace's true nature than most.
Glad to see this hate-filled gumdrop return from the depths of hell to appear in another video game. Happy birthday, you hideous abomination.
McDonald's has kinda disappeared in my city. They used to be everywhere, but now I couldn't tell you where to find one. It's all Popeyes chicken and the occasional A&W now. Clearly the tide has turned in the ongoing fast food wars.
And don’t forget the ds training video game. (For which the password is missing alas. https://youtu.be/-e6xOBCAVvA
@romanista
Unless I'm mistaken, the McDonalds DS training game "eCrew Development Program" was fully preserved and accessible.
https://archive.org/details/mcdonalds-japan-ecdp-rom-training-nintendo-ds-cartridge-dump
@RupeeClock
Thanks
In spite of my objections to actually eating anything at McDonald's, this is pretty neat.
But the anachronistic text-speak and "literally insane" dialogue bothers me. I wish that it had the personality/rhetoric of something from the late 90s/early 00s. I demand that millenial authenticity, dammit!
I'm also a little peeved that this isn't available for the Switch, be it a free or paid download (or an over-the-counter purchase for a PS4/PS5 disc or Switch cartridge, oooooffff, though that would never happen in this day and age).
Incidentally, I still have my two McDonald's CD-ROMs from the late 90s (the latter of which still works on Windows 10), which were produced specifically for the Australian/New Zealand markets. They appear to have been rather cheaply made (and the characters all speak with Australian accents), but at a modest $5 each, I've played a whole lot worse that cost a whole lot more. It saddens me that such games nowadays would be distributed via QR codes for one's mobile device. It's all so impersonal and the collectible novelty nonexistent. Worse still is that such games will inevitably be rendered unplayable in the space of a single OS update and consequently lost to history.
@Poodlestargenerica : Same, friend. Same.
I harbour almost no nostalgia for anything from the NES/SNES era (or prior), but I'm an enormous sucker for anything GB/GBC. I've never even watched the Bill and Ted movies, and I ordered the ludicrously stingy and overpriced physical release from LRG. I also bought Collection of Mana purely for the GB ROM.
Important question: what flavor is the shake? Grape I am guessing.
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