For reasons no one can fathom, McDonald’s has released a new Game Boy Color game
Enlarge / We couldn't get it on genuine hardware on short notice, but the game runs fine on the Analogue Pocket using a Game Boy Color FPGA core. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Infinite monkeys working at infinite typewriters would have trouble coming up with the sentence I am about to write: Fast food giant McDonald's has released a new retro-style game featuring Grimace, the purple milkshake blob. While it's clearly meant to be played in a browser on a phone or computer, it's also a fully working Game Boy Color game that you can download and play on the original hardware.
Grimace's Birthday was developed by Krool Toys, a Brooklyn-based independent game studio and "creative engineering team" with a history of creating playable Game Boy games as unique PR for musicians and brands. The game assumes you're playing in an emulator via a browser window-you can play that version of the game here-but we also got it running on an Analogue Pocket thanks to a Game Boy Color FPGA core and a downloadable ROM hosted on the Internet Archive.
The game is so period-authentic that there's even a screen telling original monochrome Game Boy owners that the game "requires a color device to play." Even on Game Boy hardware, it still makes references to people playing on "mobile devices,"