1990s McDonald's Game is Hiding a Creepy Secret | Game Rant

Creepy secrets in games are nothing new, but some games seem so innocuous that the presence of unsettling Easter Eggs is especially scary. This is the case for McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure, a well-regarded Sega Genesis game with an intentionally scary secret that has finally been discovered.

If asked to think about McDonald's in relation to video games, many people would first point to the recent wildly popular McDonald's Pokemon promotion. However, McDonald's history in the genre goes back much further. The chain released several simple Sonic the Hedgehog handheld video games in the mid-2000s, for example. Going back further, Ronald McDonald himself had a starring role in 1993, in the aforementioned McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure, an innocent-seeming platformer in which the iconic clown goes on a magical treasure hunt. The game had an impressive pedigree, being created by renowned developer Treasure.

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As recorded by YouTube channel edwardbeluha, McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure does something strange if players enter a specific password, followed by a series of additional button inputs. The iconic Golden Arches marquee will suddenly become an impressive 3D tech demo in line with the SNES Star Fox games. It's legitimately quite impressive, with the player able to rotate and scale various objects. However, the music becomes distorted and sinister-sounding when players activate the tech demo, giving the distinct sense that something is very wrong.

According to a related forum discussion on retro fansite Sega-16.com, the sinister Easter Egg was possibly included out of spite. The beta version of McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure appears to have featured McDonald's hamburgers, but the McDonald's corporation apparently vetoed the idea. This led to some last-minute changes that likely left the developers feeling peeved. The founder of Treasure, Masato Maegawa, claimed that spite motivated the team to include a way to make the SEGA logo explode, but this doesn't seem to have been implemented. That said, an explosion sound is heard while entering the inputs for the 3D tech demo, so it's possible the team funneled spite into the tech demo instead.

This secret brings to mind a frightening Easter Egg from another 1993 Sega Genesis game, Sonic CD. While that game uses the SEGA CD's CD-ROM capacities to include a gorgeous animated introduction, the developers managed to pack a number of strange secrets in as well. With the right cheat codes, players can find a screen filled with demonic, distorted images of Sonic, along with the message "fun is infinite." While this is much more overtly disturbing than the McDonald's game Easter Egg, at least it doesn't seem to have been created as part of a developer's grudge.

To the credit of the developers at Treasure, they hid the Easter Egg well enough to keep it secret for almost 30 years. In the meantime, the studio didn't have to worry about reprisal from McDonald's, and could instead enjoy the positive reputation from having created all-time classic games like Gunstar Heroes. Not every would-be Easter Egg creator is so lucky. For example, one of the programmers for the Nintendo 64's The New Tetris hid a profanity-laced rant against his coworkers in the game's code, hoping it would be discovered years later. Much to his chagrin, it was discovered about three days after the game's release.

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Source: Sega-16