This is using my gameboy emulator, binjgb[0], on the website! (well one of my gameboy emulators, heh [1][2]) It's been used as the emulator for GB Studio for a little while now, but I don't know how often people embed it in their websites, so it's really cool to see.
heh, good point! Most of the older ones are using GameBoy-Online[0] instead, since that was the GB Studio default for a while. But I think everything since GBStudio 3 should be binjgb.
I personally don't think we should expect more from a "richer" user as soon as they're following the license of OSS (or expect anything different at all, regardless users' background or purpose).
Not only that but Macdonald's presumably paid for this game to be developed etc.
That developer is more directly profiting from the tools. If you want to make a moral argument, surely it's them that should be passing money down the chain.
If I buy something from Amazon, should it be on me to identify the open source projects they use and pay them? Further where does it stop? Someone presumably used Linux in all this, do I need to send Linus a cut? Which driver writers do I need to support? How many copies of busy box were used in all this?
Where do you put the bar of the legal vs morale argument? A few days ago, I discovered a government entity in Pakistan was using my AGPL software [1] to handle censoring of media through their "ministry of information and broadcasting". I did release my software under AGPL as I like the underlying ideology of free software with a large emphasis on the freedom and not the free of charge but would have never expect some regime would come to use it to handle censoring.
I personally think your particular scenario is the easier one: such "client" will ignore any license requirement or "moral pressure" anyway, as soon as they can acquire the software in some way. There shouldn't be moral burden on the devs. You do more good (way more) than harm. Otherwise I doubt Linus can sleep at night. I'd say this is no difference from, say, a knife manufacturer when it comes to the harm the knives do.
Commercial use is something devs are more torn because they feel they're being exploited while the client is not doing anything wrong inherently (doing business).
And in that case, you have to adjust your expectation to be exactly the same as the license you put in to resolve such cognitive dissonance.
Woah. This is really an incredible project. I'm currently running a seafile server for this purpose but it really isn't all that great and I keep debating going back to simple SFTP. Using your frontend would be a great addon.
Very nice work and congrats on taking this on successfully.
Morally, everyone in a value chain should get a cut, including the cleaning lady keeping your toilet stalls fresh and the midwife who helped deliver her.
Alas our cultural narrative frames achievements as products of genius individuals existing in a vacuum rather than celebrating them as accomplishments of humanity or at least the societies that enabled them to be brought about.
So yeah, legally it doesn't make any sense. Morally it's highly debatable.
The amount of money that McDonalds makes is completely irrelevant to how much the developer "deserves". Especially given that they released their product as open-source and explicitly sought no payment.
What you can do isn't necessarily the same as what you should do. McDonald's missed an opportunity to make this even cooler by compensating the developer. A couple thousand dollars in the right place can be more effective than millions in marketing. It just shows the company cares.
How about the hundreds of open source contributors to web browsers? What about the children of the people who clean the offices of the studio that made the game? I bet I could identify about a million people who deserve a bonus here.
Hell, we're long overdue for a universal basic income - such that everyone can pursue things for the sake of coolness or intellectual curiosity or whatever if they want to, without needing to worry about making ends meet.
One could argue that the relatively high compensation for programmers is the main reason so much cool opensource stuff could even get started. A universal income for everyone could, hypothetically, put everyone in a similar position of being able to afford to do "productive" hobbies, vs. working a third minimum wage job.
It's not a random bonus though. It makes sense in the context of the promotion.
In any case, that is far off the point of my comment, which is explicit in the very first sentence. You tried flipping my argument but destroyed the context in the process.
Maybe it's both OK to say things like this to promote the megabusiness...
>Just be sure to order some McDonald’s to support them. Who knows… if we keep eating McDonald’s, they might keep producing these oddball retro gaming related projects.
>I, for one, will NEVER stop eating McDonald’s. You have my word.
...and it's also OK to wonder if that megabusiness could've paid or otherwise credited the small guy. Not that it's obligated to.
Compensation was suggested just because of the size of the company and you said, a little passive aggressively I would add, that one should read the licensing terms before commenting, in which ocasion I pointed out that what one is able to do, legally, isn't necessarily what one should do, meaning morality and legality are two separate, sometimes intersecting paths but not always, as in this case.
I have the right to stand up in front of a music performer, invite friends to come over and listen to the great show, receive expensive gifts from my friends for their great evening and then give nothing to the street performer. Its my right !
I mean... yeah. In the meantime you haven't taken anything from that person; they are performing on a public street. On the contrary, similar to a packed restaurant, your presence might signal to others that there is something worth experiencing where you and your friends are crowded. This could in turn benefit the person you're crowded around by bringing more wallets within earshot. So you haven't actually given nothing, you've given your attention, and you've advertised for that person as if you were wearing a giant chicken suit spinning a sign and shouting, "Hey everyone, check out this person! Their music is good enough to attract a crowd!"
The fact that your friends in this scenario would weirdly shower you with expensive gifts after inviting them to watch a street musician perform doesn't negate the free advertising you've provided.
Yes, the performer would benefit from that attention. Maybe some of the people your presence brings around will tip them, etc.
The difference is that the existence of the performer is super obvious while in this case author and their work is hidden so author will not benefit in the same way.
Sure, that does differentiate the two scenarios. I was responding specifically to the first scenario.
I have an arguably bad habit of responding only to specific points that people make in their arguments, while ignoring the rest of their argument until they address the unresolved point. In this case, someone tried to make a point about standing around street performers. I had something to say about it.
I see, I took it as objection to the bigger point, because many probably do the same if you want to avoid misunderstanding you can keep doing what you're doing just with a clarification that you have no strong opinion on the issue
The author is also hidden from anyone who would be authorizing payment. The only person involved who might know the author is the guy making the game, and they likely used what leverage they had on their own contract.
based on what I know about other engineers it's almost certain that no one used any leverage whatsoever and the only reason they even checked the license is because legal forced them
Not everyone does everything with the expectation of seeing their bank account inflated in return. Sometimes people work on things just for the gist of it and I always appreciate seeing something driven solely by legitimate enthusism. :)
Funny how people ask this while also being critical on Nintendo. If creator of emulator is to be compensated, are you going to compensate Nintendo as well?
This isn't even the first legitimately interesting video game connection to McDonalds, weirdly.
Treasure is an influential game development studio that did a lot of really interesting work in the mid to late 90s, responsible for games like Gunstar Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, Bangai-o, Silhouette Mirage, Dynamite Headdy, Mischief Makers, Alien Soldier, and others. They were a bunch of ex-Konami developers (who had worked on games like Contra 3, Axelay, Super Castlevania 4, the arcade Simpsons) who were tired of making license games and wanted to make their own original games. A few of their games did well in the market, but they and their particular approach to innovation in action game rule systems has had a much, much bigger impact on other action game developers since.
And their very first game when they left Konami and started their own studio, the game they had to make to stay afloat to make Gunstar Heroes, was... a Sega Genesis McDonalds game, the 1993 "McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure".
Not even the only McDonald's branded game of the era! I played MC Kids growing up on NEWS and it also was a dramatically better game than it had any right to be. Not quite the same storied history but still recommend playing if you're looking for some hidden NES gems.
I've seen Pepsiman played at a GDQ[0] event and it is such good entertainment. I forget which year it was but I remember commentary about how the community found the guy who did the acting ("Pepsi for TV Game!") in the game and how he claimed to have been specifically directed to use broken English.
I played that alot as a kid. I struggled with staying focused to beat a game, especially with the infamouse Sonic 3 Carnival Night Zone before the age of Youtube. This game was one of the first I was able to beat as a kid.
>Just be sure to order some McDonald’s to support them. Who knows… if we keep eating McDonald’s, they might keep producing these oddball retro gaming related projects.
>I, for one, will NEVER stop eating McDonald’s. You have my word.
Uh... hail marketing! Nothing quite like getting nostalgia exploited for corporate profits. But hey, its important to support... uh... 'retro gaming?'
The anti-corporatism shtick is so lame. Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad. Just because something is an advertisement doesn’t make it bad.
I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.
> Just because something is done by a massive corporation doesn’t make the thing bad
I don't think anyone was saying this. Some airlines plant trees. That doesn't make planting trees bad.
But massive corporations (with maybe ~1% or fewer exceptions) don't base their practices on anything remotely resembling bad or good, and this leads them to profit-seeking behaviours that harm people on an individual level (which I think is a "bad" thing), as well as the planet, the environment, the economy, their competitors.
McDonalds is not a good or ethical company. The corporate apologism is "so lame".
> I don't think anyone was saying this. Some airlines plant trees. That doesn't make planting trees bad.
Then you misunderstood the comment in question. It was quite clearly saying this. We're reading an innocuous blog post, and this person is aping reddit /r/hailcorporate language to vilify a marketing ploy by McDonald's, "exploiting nostalgia blah blah blah."
You're right, they are not a good or ethical company. If it's corporate apologism to disagree with this complaint about "exploitation" of nostalgia, count me in as an apologist too. This doesn't register on the list of corporate misdeeds for me to be mad about. I'm more upset with "flushable wipes" that end up clogging local sewage systems.
It's hard to see what they misunderstood. The comment is about this thing being done by McDonald's rather than "something ... done by a massive corporation". The difference is in the specificity.
The point I get is not that "advertising from any large corporation is Bad" but instead that advertising from a corporation whose operations are Bad is Bad (because that specific corporation is Bad). It reads to me as an uncharitable take that OP is saying "making retro video games is Bad" (because large corporations are Bad) when I read "McDonald's being McDonald's is Bad" (because McDonald's is Bad).
You think that finding a way to get food in front of people at the largest possible scale and the lowest possible marginal price hasn't helped anyone at the individual level? In your own words, they don't base their practices on good or bad. Meaning their actions should be statistically uncorrelated with doing help or harm. You can say its not a good or ethical company, but you can also say its not a bad or unethical company either. It just is, and that was kind of the point.
> You think that finding a way to get food in front of people at the largest possible scale and the lowest possible marginal price hasn't helped anyone at the individual level?
I agree with your point. McDonald's value meals have been a staple for low income households for a long time, and from what I hear the app provides daily deals that can mean the difference between someone going hungry or not.
Of all the corporations a person could get mad at, choosing one that is well known for feeding low income families is an odd choice.
The parent comments only criticism was this was done by a large corporation. There is literally no other substance to their comment.
The behaviour you’re describing as profit seeking is also really just value seeking, as in providing something that their customers value. I don’t think there’s substantial moral consequences one way or the other for a company to do this, but there’s nothing wrong with enjoying or commenting on a corporation providing a product that you value.
I would otherwise be 'on your side' but this is not a great take. Lockheed Martin's profits also help pay for pensions. Phillip-Morris as well. I don't think this makes their business actions a net good.
Lockheed Martin's profits pave way to Pax Americana, unprecedented peaceful period in world history, deter China and Russia and helped getting Saddam, Gaddafi and Miloshevich to justice. It would be a net good to humanity either way.
Relativism is used as a universal cudgel to reason that some short-term good of limited scope, outweighs a widespread long term bad behavior.
Moral objectivism is more popular than moral relativism.
ie Some good does not outweigh lots of bad.
> Their profits pay pensions of the ordinary people. How is that not a good thing?
It's difficult to take your comment as anything but raw trolling, as it intentionally chooses to strawman limited benefit by ignoring obvious consequence.
Their profits exist solely because they exploit and steal from other ordinary people. Most ordinary people will lose far more money to labour or wage theft than they'll ever gain from profits.
If anyone can find a spark of counterculture in 2023 I encourage it. There is no longer a battleground for the soul of society. It's safe to say the suits won.
Counterculture doesn't really work post-90s because mainstream culture started embracing all the previously marginalised groups.
You can hold an illegal gay rave under a bridge, and in response mainstream media figures will write articles demanding the permit process be made easier, then McDonald's will retweet photos of your ravers eating a meal the morning after. This is...okay, I guess. Social permissiveness is the circus, and it's still good even though our share of the bread is constantly shrinking.
Are you familiar with normcore? There's an argument to be made that the most counterculture thing you can do is to semi-ironically eat a Happy Meal in order to support indie Gameboy devs
Of course there is a battleground. The counterculture is more alive than ever. It's just all been thoroughly subsumed by capitalism.
Those kids on the streets protesting most recent excesses of multinational corporations? The hoodies and Guy Fawkes masks they're wearing, the signs they're holding, the chains they're rattling - all bought on Amazon, happily providing specialized merch for the "fuck the system" market niche. And what do those kids achieve? Mostly they generate attention that moves newspapers and keeps millions glued to where they can be best exposed to ads. Etc.
Yes, the suits love the anti-corporate movements. They are a quite profitable form of entertainment.
Hate to break it to you but the counterculture in the 2020s is the mindset of Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, and that overall crew. They are the ones pushing back against mainstream consensus and institutions, for better or worse! Really gives a perspective on how the "counterculture" glorified by the baby boomers was perceived by the older generations.
Hmm, I think I actually have something to contribute here in terms of understanding: you're right that counterculture doesn't really exist as it may have in the past, but the desire to show individuality still is there which has led to a progressive acceleration in the edginess/weirdness of modern meme culture.
If you feel slightly put off by the memes you see and/or discourse around them, it's sort of by design. It's meant to differentiate.
I've only recently realized this though (as I've expanded my perspective), and I think for the most part, this is something that largely happens subconsciously. If you ask someone gen z or younger, they won't know what you're talking about if you ask. That's mostly because your baseline of edginess/weirdness is defined by relative experience, and someone who's grown up perpetually online is likely to be skewed much more differently than someone who hasn't.
Yeah, the evisceration of corporate-everything has really unnecessarily crowded out enjoyment of all the good parts, while at the same time somehow managing to look more ridiculous as a POV than I ever expected.
Back in the edgy days, I never thought I'd find blanket-corporate-hatred becoming quite so lame, to the point of even taking on its own corporate-style blandness, in the 2020s...
I say it with humor, because it sounds like an oxymoron. But it does describe a certain wealthy, anti-capitalist clade here in Portland. (And I'll happily point that out to my friends, whether or not we agree on things).
I was just thinking of the last time I was waiting in my car at the McDonald's drive-thru with the rest of the proles, and a friend called. When I told him where I was, he had let out an involuntary "ugh" sound, and expressed that he can't believe I eat that garbage, let alone support that corporation. This particular friend owns a business that serves billion-dollar corporations, lives in a $1.2M house, drops $200 on bottles of wine at fine restaurants (where he's known for showing up in Transformers pajama bottoms) and grows almost all his own vegetables. Bernie stickers all over his (multiple) Subarus.
I guess "privileged commie" was a bit of wry shorthand, but it's not that much of a stretch.
It’s funny since pricing is set based upon social behavior (do we spend that or not and/or should we charge that or not?) capitalism is socialism with obligation to carry around a mind virus that preserves the figurative identity of Bezos and the like; they’re “better” capitalists.
I mean, socialism is capitalism with a mind virus that encourages displays of self-sacrifice, without really eradicating greed. Personally I think hypocrisy is more corrosive than ambition, and bitterness is more corrosive than misplaced hopefulness. (I also don't compare my worth to others based on money, and I don't envy the likes of Bezos. I do enjoy being paid and occasionally buying things that make my life more enjoyable, but certainly not because other people can't afford them; holding a grudge upward or holding a superiority complex downward would be the kind of "mind virus" you describe, but it's totally unnecessary if all you want is to have an enjoyable and productive life in a capitalist society full of fun shit and chances to build things that people in communist societies couldn't have dreamed of).
The thing I love most about Portland is that you can have these intellectual debates almost everywhere you go, really get to hear other people's thought processes based on their personal situations, and understand where they're coming from. I'm by no means a hard-liner; but I spend half my time out in Newberg which has an entirely different set of baked-in assumptions and priorities. I'm as likely to get into deep debates with people there as I am here, but far less likely to get into interesting theoretical territory. At least this place still has the ferment, the ideological exploration and experimentation of one of the 1920s capitals of Europe, as opposed to the stochastic but rigid normie-core preference structure of everywhere else in America. I appreciate that.
American culture is sick from advertising. There will never be enough anti corporate sentiment anywhere. You should assume these businesses are killing you and know it because that's the one thing they reliably do. Anything else is to distract you from that. If they do something "nice" you can bet they could have done more better.
> I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.
Plenty of people will have plenty of issues with a major corporation. But it's worth pointing out that McDonald's is one of the most prominent fast food chains which has no problem with animal abuse in terms of products from horribly treated livestock animals. They have trouble even making their french fries livestock-torture free .
Maybe this issue doesn't personally matter to you, but it does create a huge problem for a company that does something so shamelessly unethical.
Chex Quest was my first FPS and only many years later did I learn about Doom. It all clicked and my gratitude for whoever at General Mills was responsible for the title flowed immensely.
For me, it's the McChicken. The best fast food sandwich. I even ask for extra McChicken sauce packets and the staff is so friendly and more than willing to oblige.
One time I asked for McChicken sauce packets and they gave me three. I said, "Wow, three for free!" and the nice friendly McDonald's worker laughed and said, "I'm going to call you 3-for-free!".
Now the staff greets me with "hey it's 3-for-free!" and ALWAYS give me three packets. It's such a fun and cool atmosphere at my local McDonald's restaurant, I go there at least 3 times a week for lunch and a large iced coffee with milk instead of cream, 1-2 times for breakfast on the weekend, and maybe once for dinner when I'm in a rush but want a great meal that is affordable, fast, and can match my daily nutritional needs.
Right. My experience in this realm is often the store employee either charging me or acting like I'm stealing from their personal savings account by asking for extra sauce.
Thankfully you don't have to be too concerned. It's for the same reason Miracle Whip doesn't actually call itself mayonnaise, and Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise does. Mustard, garlic, etc., are not mayonnaise ingredients.
Indeed, you're right. I thought at its most basic it is just egg whites and oil, but googling that specifically says mustard is part of the recipe.
So it's still a mystery why McDonalds doesn't just call it Mayonnaise when the ingredients are pretty much identical to every other mayonnaise out there, including Hellmann's REAL Mayonnaise.
Maybe it's one of those "It's only X if it comes from the X region" type issues. It just makes it sound suspicious for no discernable reason. Like buying a bottle of "Wet 'water' style beverage."
What is rational about being cynical that I want to spend my money on things I think are cool?
Maybe there's merit in asking why I think it's cool to begin with (and in this case I hardly think mcdonalds is responsible for people who like gameboy games), but there doesn't seem to be much to gain in asking myself why I want to spend money on things I like. What else should I spend my money on?
They made a Gameboy game and now you're buying hamburgers.
If you're doing a 'vote with your wallet' thing to try to convince them to make more retro games that at least makes sense, even if id argue it's a little naive, but that's not even what were talking about. They made a videogame and now people are pledging to buy their hamburgers.
It makes perfect sense. McDonalds did something unconventional and apparently popular. People that found that valuable send the strongest signal you can send in an economy - money. "Corporate profits" take a look at the bank and they think "hmm, that seemed to work, we'll do more of that". They might not produce another gameboy game, that signal might need to be calibrated over further attempts to figure out why people bought more hamburgers. But certainly some signal concerning the approach they took will be loud and clear.
McDonalds obviously made the game in the hope that it will sell more hamburgers. If you buy a hamburger, their strategy worked, which means they (and other companies that are watching) have a reason to do similar things in the future.
What’s weird about incentivizing behavior you like in the hope that you get more of that behavior?
The behaviour in question isn't simply producing retro games. It is producing something unique and interesting that their competitors are not offering. It is an edge.
If their competitors copycat McDonalds' marketing, they totally didn't get that message, because by the time they clone it, the uniqueness McDonalds demonstrated does not apply to them - they've made a copy, or even a shadow of what came moments before. The edge McDonalds had is their cliff to behold unless they find something unique to counter with.
Acknowledging that it’s a multifaceted mega-corp (and some of the facets are bad) is it really naive to associate excellent marketing with moral goodness? What is this marketing doing if not signaling that at least some of the company reflects values you support? Deciding to support the company by buying hamburgers logically follows.
I’m enjoying the corporate apologetics personally. I’ve heard there is a Christian resurgence among the youth, and this makes me wonder if there will be a resurgence of pro-capitalism sentiment as well. Ideas, values, culture: it all evolves with time.
I'm no expert, but I thought we should prefer farm raised, no? Seems weird to advertise they are wild caught when that's a big concern with over-fishing in the wild.
My understanding of the situation is that the U.S. federal government has been doing an excellent job of managing fisheries over the past couple of decades — there was an overfishing crisis in the 80’s, but since then we’ve gotten our act together and implemented population monitoring and fishing quotas. There are definitely problems (especially with certain methods of fishing causing bycatch problems or habitat destruction), but researchers and regulators seem to be mostly on top of them. Farm-raised fish have their own set of challenges — mainly health concerns and the potential for environmental disasters [0] — so there’s not necessarily a clear winner between farmed and wild fish. It also depends heavily on the particular species of fish.
My source for this is an elective class I took at Oregon State University a few years ago, taught by a professor who is deeply involved in fishery research and management. So perhaps he was biased, but from what he presented I was thoroughly impressed with the sustainability practices of the seafood industry. One of my big takeaways was that wild Alaskan halibut in particular (which is what McDonald’s uses) is among the best seafoods, and one of the most sustainable foods in existence.
I agree with you broadly, and despite their abhorrent reputation for sourcing unethical animal products, it does seem that you're right about McDonald's fish. However, on a larger scale, one of the hidden ethical pitfalls is that a lot of wild-caught fish comes from international waters, where there are no regulations whatsoever, or are imported from Asian countries with little to no regard for such things. Japan infamously still allows whaling. The global fishing industry is also rife with modern-day slavery.
> or are imported from Asian countries with little to no regard for such things. Japan infamously still allows whaling. The global fishing industry is also rife with modern-day slavery.
Those are very good points that I neglected to mention, and my professor spent a lot of time discussing them. One of the main points of the class is that seafood sustainability is extremely dependent on the species of fish and the country of origin, and so it’s important to do research on where your fish is coming from. I don’t remember a lot of details anymore, but I do specifically remember that most stuff from Alaska is excellent, and shrimp is awful in terms of ethics & sustainability.
Literally everything you do has an impact in some way on the environment. If you want to boycott everything, you won't have an existence.
Living is all about understanding trade offs and making informed decisions. Just because plants don't scream when you kill them doesn't mean a plant-only diet is without negative effects as well.
The new burgers are better as well. It's not in-and-out but they improved the cheese and the patties have gone from "circular cardboard" to "kind of resembles a burger" on the quality scale. For folks that live in Europe and have access to better McDonalds this might not be anything new, but for us it's a big upgrade.
TBH, there are also quite a few posts here in this thread where my internal ChatGPT detector goes off. The funny thing is, they could also very well be meant ironically, and I can't really separate this anymore.
I cannot read any enthusiastic endorsement of McDonald's without thinking of the meme/patent [0] from Sony proposing that viewers skip commercials by yelling brand names at their TV:
Kinda makes me think of those tobacco advertisements of yesteryear. It's like "oh hey, Winston cigarettes sponsored the Flintstones, I'll never stop smoking Winstons."
Who knows, perhaps one day we'll look back on modern day fast food ads and consider them equivalent to cigarette ads.
I can't quite tell if this is written by an LLM (and aided by a person, re: the developer is known) or the writing style is just so prolific that LLMs cant help but ape it.
I think it's because every sentence is pretty short.
These sentences end up being related, and should probably be just one paragraph.
The writing style seems to separate everything out, I can say this might be what gives the impression of a LLM gluing parts together!
I wonder if they received a McDonalds presser, and I wonder how much of those are still human-in-the-loop.
Well the author, Anthony, is a digital nomad who's known for minimal effort fluff pieces so it would seem like a natural progression to use LLMs. At some point retro dodo might skip the middle name and render him unemployed.
I know I sound bitter but it's because retro dodo used to be a high quality production shop (still mostly is, to be fair). Though I understand that it wasn't sustainable for the original two guys to do everything alone (they've branched from blogging to youtubing to even book publishing after all)
I can't quite tell if this comment is written by an LLM (and aided by a person) or the writing style is just so prolific that LLMs cant help but ape it.
I think it's because every sentence is pretty short.
These sentences end up being related, and should probably be just one paragraph.
The writing style seems to separate everything out, I can say this might be what gives the impression of a LLM gluing parts together!
Does this have the Nintendo logo in the ROM header? Real GameBoys check the ROM for an image containing Nintendo's logo during boot up as a way to prevent unlicensed games. The idea is, to make a GMB/GBC boot, you must at least commit trademark infringement, which gives Nintendo more legal leverage to block/punish any attempts to sell anything that Nintendo didn't get a cut of.
If the logo is missing, it would still boot on an emulator that doesn't emulate the boot ROM (which is most of them) and probably most flashcarts, so there's no need for it to be in their release. But it's still possible that whatever build system they used automatically inserted the logo.
There's no way Nintendo would bother McDonalds legally over something like this if the logo's in there, but I'm still curious if it is.
Your jurisdiction may vary, but under Sega v Accolade [1], I'd expect including the logo to be fair use, as including the trademarked data for Sega's TMSS was.
No, they avoided the issue. I was hoping for it. Surely Nintendo would have worked with them to license this; I feel it would be in their interests too.
The music sounds particularly awesome, first thing I noticed is how deep the bass sounds given the limitations of the medium.
Looks like it is using a separate tone for the initial kick, and then a sweep an octave lower, it really sounds huge. This is the first time hearing a Game Boy game through nice headphones though, so I'm not sure if this is also present in older games.
There's a mismatch between GBT Player and the GB hardware due to what can be expressed in the .mod format, meaning GBT is only capable of really beepy sounds (unless you're super good). hUGE gives more control over the hardware since it was made for it (and you can losslessly import GBT .mods). Ultimately though you can use whatever works for you, there are other drivers out there as well.
They immediately broke the nostalgia spell when they used 'smh' in the opening game, that was like hitting a brick wall of anachronism. Neat effort though. Glad someone got paid to make it.
Either it's in the console ROM, in which case it's not a problem, or it's in the cartridge ROM, in which case I'd imagine it's just a matter of replacing the raster data with something else.
It's in the game, but the console famously checks that the code for the logo is present, and refuses to run any game which doesn't have the code in place.
It was used as a way to prevent anyone unauthorized making games. If you copy the logo, you have violated trademark and copyright law, and if you don't copy the logo, your game won't run.
If I remember correctly, the ROM gets read once to check, and then again to display. One could use some circuitry to deliver another logo on the second read.
The idea is that by forcing games to include the trademarked Nintendo logo in the game ROM, an unlicensed dev would be guilty of trademark infringement if they used the logo.
The era where "retro" meant "NES" is behind us, now retro means Game Boy Color, PS1, and Quake-era PC aesthetics. To wit, the developers of Shovel Knight (the premier NES platformer homage) are developing a GBC-styled Bloodborne-like called Mina the Hollower: https://www.yachtclubgames.com/games/mina-the-hollower/ (though sadly it's not designed to run on original hardware).
In the late 90's to early 2000's, I considered "retro" games to be anything from the beginning of time right up the the NES. So, roughly anything that fell out of popularity about 10 years in the past. It didn't seem weird because in the late 90's, we were calling everything in the '80's retro. All that funky synth music and hair was pretty weird and alien to those who grew up on either side of it, after all.
The most modern gaming system in our living room (if you don't count the Steam Deck) is a Wii which is legitimately a retro system these days and I get a little grumpy every time I am reminded of this.
There are Gen Z that played PS3/Xbox 360 when they were children, and are now adults out of college with their own children. I think that's a good measure of "retro", and it would mean PS4 will enter retro status in ~2031.
Most modern games could be ported to the PS3 and Xbox 360, keeping gameplay the same but lowering graphical fidelity. The same cannot be said of porting N64 games to the NES. I think a better measure of retro-ness would include the degree to which gameplay experience is influenced by the game's age.
Many in the community, such as the long-running Retronauts podcast, use 10 years as the line when something becomes "retro". By that definition, the PS4 becomes retro later this year.
I'd even argue that any console that is no longer in production can be considered retro; after all, you're then dependent on secondhand consoles and repairs to be able to play things on them; they have become a finite product.
I find it difficult to call any PC that has a CPU clock expressed in GHz retro / vintage. Even though I know PCs 20 years ago were already in that ballpark.
I'm currently playing around with a PC I built up from random parts, based on an AMD Duron 1200. I have Windows 98 SE on it. It does feel retro. But then I compare it to my 486, and it suddenly doesn't anymore.
Well, both have the same access to the SSL/TLS web: almost nil. With W95 on the 486 with 32MB of RAM and a de-IE4'ized W98 both would be virtually the same except for the speed.
A Pentium II would be a better example for both: Not too old, not too recent. Yet it suits as retro and a usable machine. Enough to render some XVID videos at 360p and 420p with a good video card. Slackware, NetBSD and lot of distros would still run fine. TLS under Lynx and Gopher would still work, the same as a Gopher client.
Nope. I was born in 1987, and Chinese NES clones were sold well up to 1997 until everyone in ~1999 got a Play Station at home as the prices went down. So, to US, retro was NES and the older GB games such as Mario Land 1.
The entire project probably cost about as much as a couple months on an urban billboard (around $100,000 or so) and the ROI is probably higher.
So this was likely a reasonable investment. You're going to get YouTubers covering it, people doing speed runs, blogs and news aggregators. Good return.
yeah a lot of people in this thread seem to be completely unaware of GB Studio's existence, which is funny because a lot of people learn to make games in GB Studio nowadays. The GB Studio scene is pretty active.
I was wondering how a newly made Game Boy Color game would be distributed today:
> But today, twenty five years after the Game Boy Color was released, we can play Grimace’s Birthday for free on our web browser.
> It is unclear if McDonald’s hoped to keep the game locked on their website or if there’s any particular reason they wouldn’t want us to have a ROM. (I would assume something something emulator, something something copyright infringement.)
> But needless to say, the internet was very quick to rip the file and share it online.
Now I want to track it down so I can tell what's different when I play the inevitable rom hacks.
I know there's articles and comments saying "why", so here's a couple opinions off the top of my head:
- retro games cater to the demographic who would know who Grimace is.
- it makes news for novelty, if it was just another webgame there probably wouldn't be articles about it
- the target platform has virtual machines for every modern OS and the web, so maximum reach.
- the target platform has had decades of enthusiast development support, making IDEs and libraries.
- the target platform is fixed. No fear of some instruction or device being deprecated during development or in the future.
- the devs you could contract this out to would most likely have a depth of knowledge on the system. And any of their portfolio could be evaluated against others in a 1:1 fashion.
- It has "just enough" capability to make a game that can entertain a broad audience for the time it needs to.
Whilst there has been mention of the 1993 "McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure", I'm surprised nobody has called out their previously lost DS Game[1]. The game was distributed to McDonald’s locations throughout Japan in 2010 for the training of existing employees[2].
Does anyone know if I can check which Mcdonald's have these? I have a bit of a retro collection and this would be a cute artifact to add.
Oh it isn't a physical cart run. I was curious about the logistics of such a thing. If it were a physical cart I'd like to take a peek inside and see the board.
The questions it raises are almost more interesting then the game.
Why GBC? Did someone have a canceled but mostly finished mcdonalds game laying around since the late 90's and finally the right person at mcdonalds heard about it and got corporate to let them publish it as a marketing tie in?
Why did they decide to make a retro game and then hire a member of the gbc homebrew community? The choices behind this are interesting. Even after somebody successfully convinced corporate to fund this game it's surprising someone else didn't say "we could do this in Unity for half the price."
It really only makes sense to me if someone on the corporate ladder was already a fan of the gbc homebrew community, or close to someone that was.
If you want something retro is seems a lot easier to just get someone who made a quality homebrew game to make you one rather than search for some generic Unity shop and have them make something good that looks sufficently retro.
That's a really interesting point. It's probably much easier for a skilled developer to make a cool, natively retro game with modern tooling. I wonder if there's a future for freelancers in this space?
The article is so awful I also had to scour the comments for that question: This is only a gameboy rom they made that's playable through the browser. They're not making any physical cartridges.
I found it funny that the same developer made a game based on the "My Dinner With Andre" joke from Simpsons that complains that you can't make quirky indie games with 1-2 people funded by corporations who just want to drop their IP in: https://gumpyfunction.itch.io/my-dinner-with-andre
Yeah, it's just the ROM file. Actually releasing a physical cartridge as some bonus to a meal would have been cool. I assume the cartridge costs are still too high for that.
Looking at the grimacesbirthday.com, I'm trying to figure out someone extracted a GameBoy ROM from that page.
It looks like everything is implemented inside a WASM blob, containing what looks like binjgb (based on the strings).
I'm assuming the game itself is also included in the data section at the end of the WASM blob. Are there any good tools for reverse engineering that? (Or am I missing a more obvious way of extracting the ROM?)
If it’s only officially playable through an emulator I wonder why didn’t just use a modern game engine to make something in a pixel art style? This is definitely more interesting though
Do they advertise it as a Game Boy Color game anywhere? I wouldn’t be surprised if they can’t (or rather don’t want to risk it) for trademark reasons
Edit: The game page itself doesn’t mention it but the article has information on how it was made and by who so they must have got the information somehow, maybe the developer talked about it
It's pretty trivial for a company to make a mold for a plastic cartridge. The chips are nothing special, they are just ROMs. Cheap and widely available.
In fact, I'm pretty confident that a competent DIYer could 3D print a cartridge shell, flash a ROM, and etch a PCB in an afternoon or two.
For the Atari 2600, Game Boy, etc., the first cartridges were nothing more than a ROM chip on a printed circuit board. Later games sometimes included a lot more functionality on the cartridge (battery-backed save RAM, bank switching hardware, etc.) which does make things complicated very quickly. Today, programmable logic is sometimes used to replace old custom IC designs used in cartridges, or to design something new.
For games more complicated than a simple ROM chip, the Game Boy presents an interesting challenge: the cartridge is both very small and it needs to be able to run off battery power. That excludes using both a high-power-consumption modern SoC or FPGA, or using lots of discrete logic.
But if it'll fit in 32 KB, it's 3D print a case, order a PCB, and program a standard Flash chip.
> For the Atari 2600, Game Boy, etc., the first cartridges were nothing more than a ROM chip on a printed circuit board.
We've actually come full circle on this one. If you ever disassemble a Nintendo Switch Game Card that has a black area above the metal contacts, it doesn't even have a PCB. It's just a ROM chip, with metal contacts on the bottom shaped differently than your standard BGA pattern, contained in plastic. If it has a green area above the metal contacts, it's a PCB with the chip on the other side.
This may be one of the most amazing marketing moves I’ve ever seen in my life. The day I see this headline is the day I see Grimace’s Birthday on these delicious McNuggets w/ bbq sauce. And these fries, so good.
In beginning of the game, the McDonalds logo only appears on a garbage can and if you run into it - you die. It's a positive message for health conscious parents.
Back in college (now 15 years ago) I did an analysis of fast food menus for a nutrition class.
McDonalds turned out to be the easiest to get a healthy meal from at the time. They had things like salads, apple slices, and a much wider variety of items than other fast food restaurants meaning that if you were to eat there every day it was much easier to make different healthy meals than it was at the others but like an order of magnitude.
Basically just skip the soft drink and only occasionally order the fries and you'll be fine.
The last time I tried McDonalds apple slices they somehow tasted like chemicals. I wonder how much of their "healthy" food is actually healthy. You could recreate a lot of their menu at home using fresh/real ingredients and it'd probably be a lot healthier than the stuff they ship all over the country in plastic, pumped full of salt and preservatives, then wrapped in PFAS.
McDonalds used to be dirt cheap (in the UK), so you could eat there if you didn't have much money. Now it's pretty expensive if I eat there with my kids I could easily spend £20+. It would be way cheaper for me to buy real food and prepare it at home and their price is getting comparable with REAL pub and restaurant food. Given most of their stuff still tastes like cardboard I only go there when my kids need a fix, despite it being walking distance from my home.
Interesting. Title: McDonald's dropped a game. Article: McDonald's released a game. Weird that they are saying the opposite. I was initially very confused.
A proton and a neutron walk into a bar and order beers. Bartender says to the proton, "That be $10." He turns to the neutron and says "For you, no charge."
[0] https://github.com/binji/binjgb [1] https://github.com/binji/pokegb [2] https://binji.github.io/raw-wasm/badgb/