Twenty-five years after the debut of Nintendo's Game Boy Color, a new game is out: Grimace's Birthday, from McDonald's. The purple lump is itself 52 years old, so a little nostalgia is hardly a big problem. It's a legitimate, runs-on-the-hardware release, writes Kotaku's Ashley Bardhan, but it's offered in more accessible form as a free web game too.
Grimace's Birthday—created by Brooklyn-based indie studio Krool Toys, which previously worked on turning popular albums into retro games—takes place on, as it were, Grimace's birthday. He has to round up his missing friends before it's time to blow out the candles on his cake, and you guide him to them on his very cool skateboard, picking up whipped purple milkshakes along the way. There's both a normal mode and "hard mode," where auto-grind is removed and tricks receive double the points.
Having gotten authentic retrogaming out of the way, next I would like to see McDonalds' ad agency build a boutique hauntological music label around 1970s Sleep Paralysis Demon Grimace, as seen in the television advertisement below.
