Development
Produced with a small team of developers on a budget of around $500,000, Chex Quest began life as the brainchild of the WatersMolitor promotion agency - an award-winning group that had been hired by Ralston Foods to reinvigorate the Chex cereal brand. The original idea was that a non-violent CD-ROM computer game should be released with 5.7 million boxes of Rice Chex, Wheat Chex, and Corn Chex cereals in order to cast Chex as a cereal that was exciting and fun for children while appealing to modern sensibilities by targeting home PC owners. The game would be a high-quality program whose normal retail value would be between $30 and $35, however it would be offered to consumers for free with no increase to the cost of the cereal box.
In support of the promotion coupons and advertisements were included in newspapers and magazines with total circulation of 42 million, promotional art was added to the front of all boxes containing the game, a 30-second television advertisement was broadcast, and a website (chexquest.com) was launched to present game tips, Chex recipes, and further plot details such as character biographies. To cut down on development costs, WatersMolitor formed a promotional partnership with America Online who actually manufactured the CDs in exchange for which all copies of Chex Quest came bundled with the AOL software and a "50 Free Hours" subscription offer. WatersMolitor also created a telephone help-line for gamers who encountered problems with the game and hired fledgling new media company, Digital Café to provide coding, plot, animations, and original music and art for the game.
The development of Chex Quest differed from traditional video game development in that the basic game engine had already been created and the bulk of the creation process consisted of aesthetic changes made to the music and artwork from the original Ultimate Doom. Although both had previously modded Doom levels in the past, Chex Quest was the first foray into professional game development for lead artist Charles Jacobi and programmer Scott Holman. In an interview with PC Gamer magazine in 2009, Jacobi stated that the biggest reason for the lasting success of Chex Quest has been that it is still essentially a disguised version of Doom with basically unaltered game dynamics. Indeed, the game has been recognized for having a sense of humor about its identity and origins.
Humorous aspects of the conversion take the form of ironic in-jokes related to Doom resulting from the more or less exact "translation" of previous non-essential Doom decorations into their non-essential Chex Quest equivalents. Thus the bloodied bodies and the twitching torsos from Doom become the goo-covered cereal pieces and the cereal victims twitching to extract themselves from goo in Chex Quest. Likewise, according to the plot the "health" meter represents the Chex Warrior's ability to move, with 0% representing being completely covered in slime and unable to move. Picture of the Chex Warrior in the status bar display becomes progressively more coated in slime, as opposed to bleeding as does the face in Doom.
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