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Water Cooler Games

Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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Late night munchies game

by Ian Bogost July 1, 2005

categories: Advergames

McDonalds has a cute little advergame running called Race to the Lights to promote their late night and 24hour drive-thru service. The player chooses a music style (pop, hip hop, rock, and country) and gets assigned a corresponding vehicle (coupe, wagon??, van, and pickup).

The goal is to drive your car in the fastest time possible to the end of the course. If you get through a level, you're allowed to customize your car, which actually turned out to be much more amusing than I thought it would be, probably due to the simplicity of the art.

I'm often cynical of driving games and games that mindlessly slap music onto gameplay, but this game actually makes some sense. You're cruising around late at night, listening to tunes, and you get hungry. I do think it would have made more sense if the environment had included other eating establishments that were shown to be closed past a certain hour. The game could have used a clock-based timer rather than a score-based one and allowed the player to see that McDonalds might be their best (only?) option for late-night fatty food cravings (even Wendy's well-advertised pick up window, which let's you "eat great, even late" closes by 1am. It also would have been nice to have hunger affect the gameplay somehow, or at least to include the food products in a more meaningful way than just slapping a picture of it after the first level.

(thanks to Nico)

Comments (5)

Race to the Lights is an advergame promoting McDonald’s 24 hour drive thru windows. The player must first choose their car/music type and then drive around several successive courses as quickly and accurately as they can. What I liked: The gam...

Fuel Games Blog - Race to the Lights Game Review on July 5, 2005 4:14 AM

I think this is a well built game, but I don't feel that it is a good advergame. The branding on it is too contrived and forced.

I hate games that just slap a logo onto a somewhat fun experience and consider it a great advergame, and I think that's what happened here.

There's so much more that could be done with the McDonalds brand and advertising than they did for this title.

It is a relatively fun game, just not a great advergame. (As I noted in my review here: http://www.fuelgames.com/blog/?p=51 )

Brian Robbins on July 5, 2005 4:23 AM

With all respect, I think this game is really poor. There's no excuse these days to make a game in which each level is simply some minor inflection of the last one, and where the art is the illustrator version of stock. The car handles ok, but then this customization is just poor, since it doesn't increase over time, it's not like new features or schemes get unlocked. That's an essential principle in game design, and one that someone seems to have noticed but misunderstood.

Further, it's so far off the McDonald's brand that it might as well be funded by PayPal donations to the developers. McDonalds has come so far in its conventional advertising, and it's just a damn shame to see it reduced to generic terms (e.g. mismatched and undifferentiated cartoon art) in the one area where it can make something exciting.

Overall, it's a humongous missed opportunity and to my mind no doubt a horrible waste of money.

Louis B on July 7, 2005 4:21 AM

what is so wrong about the art? about the character designs? what mcdonald's is doing is promote artists and each character is a design for each genre.

raquele on July 10, 2005 8:17 PM

The designs of the characters is quite good, I'm sorry if I glossed over everything with one brush. But those characters are only on screen for a few seconds. The rest is just the mismatched aesthetics of the cars and the track, etc. That's what I was referring to. I understood the characters as such to be little more than visual elements in the splash screen. Such as they are, though, I think they are well drawn.

Louis B on July 11, 2005 8:14 AM