The King is in your Xbox 360

49 Comments by Ross Miller Oct 2nd 2006 5:49PM
Filed under: Action, Adventure, Driving

Whereas some games, we predict, might be made to ebb the ever-growing obesity problem, fast-food giant Burger King is looking to encourage more quick dining by offering original Xbox and Xbox 360 games for $3.99 with the purchase of any value meal. Three titles, rated E for Everybody, will be released: Pocketbike Racer, Big Bumpin', and Sneak King. Inappropriate innuendo aside (and there's lots to be had), two games actually feature online play over Xbox Live.

At $4 per game, one has to wonder why Burger King didn't go for the cheaper option of handing out digital download codes for tech-saavy youngsters to download the games as XBLA titles. Microsoft abandoned the original Xbox a long time ago, and most soda / fast food contests have evolved into codes that require you to make the effort to log onto their website to find out that you're a loser.

Burger King's largest competitor, McDonald's, has a history of shacking up with the games industry to promote (financially) healthy burger-eating habits. With Nintendo, McDonald's has produced a number of kids meal toys and even set up DS-specific WiFi spots in its stores, not to mention a recent Mario-inspired commercial. And then there's a flash game about the workings of McD, but that's not exactly sanctioned by the golden arches ...

Burger King games will be available November 19 up until December 24, which makes the titles perfect for that last-minute Christmas gift. Continue reading for more information on the individual titles.

In Sneak King, "players can step into the King's royal shoes and use cunning stealth to sneak up behind unsuspecting people and bestow them with a delicious meal." We're a bit afraid what "delicious meals" the King has in mind for Ms. Pretty-in-Pink. At least we can see his hands in the picture above.

In Big Bumpin', you play bumper cars. Selectable characters include the King, a guy in a hamburger suit, "Subservient Chicken" (how medieval!), and one-time Playboy model Brooke Burke. Levels include "Ice Box," "Broiler," "King's Court," "The Deep" and "Monsoon of Doom" and up to four players can play over Xbox Live. Four-player Big Bumpin' in The Deep with Brooke Burke, eh? Sometimes this is too easy.

Pocket Bike Racers (not Pocket Rocket Racers) is a five-track racer where you and up to eight racers over Xbox Live (or four players split-screen) can compete over five tracks of what looks to be fun-yet-quick-lived Mario Kart clone (items and weapons, here, take the form of "enhancements" and "tools").

Tags: brook burke, BrookBurke, burger king, BurgerKing, whopper, xbla

(Page 1) Reader Comments

Bob Johnson: Oct 2nd 2006; 5:55PM

umm .... does anybody want my 360. It feels so dirty to me now.

Daran: Oct 2nd 2006; 5:56PM

If it has achievements, I wouldn't mind buying these.

Dracula Jones: Oct 2nd 2006; 5:56PM

For $4, I might just pick these up just as oddities. I wonder if they'll have Achievements!

Count Chocula: Oct 2nd 2006; 5:57PM

Then who gets Sony?

Carl's Jr.?

Seroth: Oct 2nd 2006; 6:01PM

I wish I had a 360. Sneak King is my dream game. I've always wanted to "wake up with the King." Now I can play as him! ..well, actually, I can't 'cause I don't have a 360. =[

ALH: Oct 2nd 2006; 6:01PM

sneak king sounds absolutley fantastic

polly: Oct 2nd 2006; 6:14PM

Only $4, and you'll get exactly what you pay for, that being not much.

I was playing FNR3 this weekend and got to the match where the BK King was the other guy's coach. I laughed at the shameless product placement, until after the match I saw him available for training for free. I felt so dirty.

Chessasaur: Oct 2nd 2006; 6:17PM

According to Gamespot, no achievments for the 360.

Willeth: Oct 2nd 2006; 6:18PM

I dunno guys. Being able to re-enact the King dropping in on someone with a Whopper? That's hot.

SaxyGator: Oct 2nd 2006; 6:20PM

Wow, first Banjo-Kazooie, now Burger King. BK=Definitely time to pick up an Xbox.

cooper: Oct 2nd 2006; 6:20PM

this is cool. BK has a good marketing team.

Blizz419: Oct 2nd 2006; 6:21PM

i take it its unknown as of yet if it has achievemnts i'm doubting it does since none of the games even say 360 sounds more like they are just xbox games with built in 360 compatability.

Komrade Kayce: Oct 2nd 2006; 6:27PM

Sneak King looks fucking dope. Id pay full price for a game where I get to hide in a garbage can, waiting to surprise someone with a BK meal.

jharr: Oct 2nd 2006; 6:27PM

It looks like two of the games are made my Blitz Games(the guys who did the original fuzion Frenzy). That is pretty interesting. I wonder if they will be decent.

alienclay: Oct 2nd 2006; 6:37PM

i find the product placement kinda funny. i wouldn't mind being able to race as the whopper jr. in fact if i wasn't actively trying to convice my wife to let me get a ps3 this would motivate me to get a 360. maybe next year they will make promos like ethese for all systems available for download. i'm sure they whent with physical media with this one to better motivate people to acctully come into your local BK.

at any rate it's better seeing blatant advertisements in blatant little romps like this instead of in weird spots developers force you to drive past between every race like certian other EA racing games i can think of.
and will probably bring a better return on the marketing dollar for BK.

TiVo: Oct 2nd 2006; 7:33PM

At least it won't be the first of many Hi_def crap games for the 360.
Ba-dump-psh.

Geoffrey: Oct 2nd 2006; 8:02PM

"one has to wonder why Burger King didn't go for the cheaper option of handing out digital download codes for tech-saavy youngsters to download the games as XBLA titles"

Because apparently unlike Joystiq, BK realizes that not all of their visitors have a fast enough connection to download non-arcade games in any reasonable amount of time. Given the apparently complexity of the graphics of these games, and comparing them to how big games such as Pacman are, I would expect them to clock in at at least 500mb were they code-based, and I simply cannot download something that large on the 360. By making them disk based, they are ensuring that anybody on any connection that has a 360 will be able to see the adveris-er... play the games.

Iscariote: Oct 2nd 2006; 8:49PM

"At least it won't be the first of many Hi_def crap games for the 360.
Ba-dump-psh."

There will be zero crappy games for the PS3.

Kaemon: Oct 2nd 2006; 9:04PM

"There will be zero crappy games for the PS3."

You mean 0, as in, most of them, right?

Blizz419: Oct 2nd 2006; 9:20PM

@ Iscariote

ya just like the PS2 only had great games right not one of there games sucked lol you know you can argue all day about PS2 having the most games but fact remains it also had the highest percentage of crap games as well keep in mind i'm not saying all its games were crap cuz it did have some killer apps.

Green_Ogre: Oct 2nd 2006; 10:21PM

To #5,

Don't worry, you can "play as the King" on your original Xbox. I saw a clearer more uplose picture on another website and the text in the little Xbox 360 bar says it works with Xbox too.

Blizz419: Oct 2nd 2006; 10:28PM

it may look like a 360 bar but it only sais xbox which leads me to believe thay are all xbox games with built in 360 compatability as i explained before.

a2: Oct 2nd 2006; 10:33PM

Awe, no football game where the King tackles you, then presents you with a meal?

cheezedog420: Oct 3rd 2006; 12:12AM

Actually counting the meal, your getting 9 dollars worth of crap... Still, I would like to see how much game your getting from Burger King. That Sneak King game looks to be worth the price of the heartburn alone.

Now with most video games, if you leave a charicter sitting too long in one place, they start a idle animation... How much you wanna bet Sneaky King's animation goes a little like this...

"Ooooo Yeaaaa.... Im alone with your food, waiting for you to take out the garbage. Ohh... you thrown away a old victora secret catalog.... Well, don't get hungry too soon.... It's Whopper time!!!"

Gapati: Oct 3rd 2006; 12:17AM

"At $4 per game, one has to wonder why Burger King didn't go for the cheaper option of handing out digital download codes for tech-saavy youngsters to download the games as XBLA titles."

There's no XBLA for the original xbox. That's .5 seconds' worth of wonder there.

Teh Destroyer: Oct 3rd 2006; 1:05AM

@25
There is in fact an XBLA for the original Xbox. It's actually got alot of the classic games the 360 LA has.

Narcogen: Oct 3rd 2006; 1:17AM

Dope? My dream game?

You guys do realize that having an entire thread populated by nothing but astroturfers is sort of pointless, don't you? There aren't any real people here at all except the thread-starter, and my reaction mirrors his.

I don't mind if, as an alternative revenue stream, ad placements work themselves into games in ways that seem reasonable and unobtrusive.

These aren't games. They're product placements masquerading as games. To charge for them at all is to ask me to pay a company to advertise to me.

It's ridiculous.

Narcogen: Oct 3rd 2006; 1:17AM

Gapati> Yes, there is XBLA for the original Xbox. That doesn't automatically mean these are compatible, but XBLA did exist before the 360.

epobirs: Oct 3rd 2006; 2:24AM

I wouldn't use XBLA versions of ancient games like Pac-man or Joust as a guide to download size. Those files are ridiculously huge compared to the original arcade code. These games, unless they contain a great deal of FMV content, are likely far, far short of 500MB. Even
if they were 500MB in file size, there is no reason you couldn't download them over any connection that works with Xbox Live. It may take quite a long time and many separate sessions but the 360 can
deal with that. I've downloaded Linux distros over dial-up back when consumer broadband was still only a promise. It took nearly two weeks of running a download agent in the background while doing other stuff but for free it was well worth the wait. Nowadays, I wouldn't hesitate to download a CD sized file so long as it didn't have to happen in a single uninterrupted session.

I suspect, as previously mentioned, that BK wanted the customer to have the feeling of a solid object in their hand with a case and other niceties. I'm sure Microsoft was more than happy to skip the production royalties for the promotional value.

foobob: Oct 3rd 2006; 7:10AM

this is the kind of games to be expected on a M$ console. the XBox 360 is just like Sega Genesis, with its handful of zanny and in-your-face titles, like McDonalds's Mick & Mack: Global Gladiators. anyone remember that? yeah, hope not...

niels: Oct 3rd 2006; 9:33AM

#30 has a point. this is just some oblique form of advertising really. and given that anything related to advertising is inherently evil, so is this. please dont play these games...

Pip: Oct 3rd 2006; 9:41AM

This brilliant, actually.

Why DOESN'T want to play a creepy stalker guy who hides in peoples homes and surprise them with burgers? The whole premise of this guy is just to creep people out.

Nick James: Oct 3rd 2006; 10:06AM

I don't see how fooboo (#30) is a PS3 fanboy because he hates the 360... his comments about the Genesis lend me to believe he's a NINTENDO fanboy more than anything...

But of course, Sony bashing is so much more fun right ;)

I kid, I kid.

On topic, I'm so buying these. I highly doubt I'll play them except when I'm extremely drunk or on a lot of drugs... but boy, will they be fun to take out in 20 years and show my kids.

"This is what happens when grows up who work in advertising companies smoke CRACK!"

SiliconHero: Oct 3rd 2006; 10:08AM

I was hoping the days of the crappy corporate-to-video-game-tie-ins had died out in the Atari 2600 era with "Kool-Aid Man" and "Chase the Chuck Wagon". Guess I was wrong.

Chris K: Oct 3rd 2006; 10:51AM

Wow, #30, if you're going to leave moronic posts about your pet hate console, at least learn to spell "zany".

Dim-witted fanboys might be more amusing to those of us who don't have a closetful of PS3 underoos, but showing your ignorance of spelling and grammar doesn't help advance your silly cause.

Petrie: Oct 3rd 2006; 10:53AM

Anybody remember Cool Spot? That game was awesome.

skr1lls: Oct 3rd 2006; 11:23AM

It's not really Burger King who is responsible for this, it is their ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky (cpbgroup.com) who is. They came up with the idea, they invented the king, the minigames, they're (secretly) producing it, and they constantly burn the world with all this 'ovaltine advertising'.

By ovaltine advertising, i'm refering to the movie "Christmas Story," when Ralphy goes on this long, wild goose chase of a radio scavenger hunt for his childhood hero Little Orphan Annie... only to find out that decoding this secret message from Annie was a lame message from some marketer, being Ovaltine. Oh. It's an ad. Sigh*

If you want to keep *****ing about it. send them an email.

Geoff: Oct 3rd 2006; 12:26PM

I read somewhere that Sneak King is built on the Manhunt engine. Actually, they just took Manhunt and replaced the main character with the king, everything else was left intact.

Green_Ogre: Oct 3rd 2006; 2:41PM

They misspelled something on the article. They have "Brooke Burne" instead of Brooke Burke.

DiscountContactLenses: Oct 3rd 2006; 7:01PM

Those Burger King commercials on TV with that guy mascot running around is funny, although a bit creepy at times. Their ad agency which I've followed closely for quite awhile now has done a pretty decent job at revitalizing a brand that was becoming stale and losing marketshare to Mickey D's. At least BK is not trying too hard to be cool with the urban crowd like Mickey D's is trying to do with their use of slang and hiphop.

1: Oct 3rd 2006; 7:57PM

Great, more encouragement for kids to eat the flesh of tortured dead animals.

Josh: Oct 7th 2006; 6:01PM

I agree with #40. I remember when Hip-Hop started getting big on the billboard charts, Mc Donalds jumped on real quick with all the urban commercials, one ridiculous tv spot featured some guys in a heated streetball game in a competitve neighborhood like Rucker park or something, and all the dudes on the sidelines were eating Big Macs. Whoever eats greasy mickey D's food while waiting to get in the next pickup game is just asking to blow chunks. On top of that Mickey D's isnt doing anything to better the hip-hop culture or inner city areas, they are just exploiting it while its popular and making money off it.

Bill: Oct 9th 2006; 2:15PM

Ah, but there is no tastier flesh than that of tortured animals, how else do you get it so tender?

PS, these games could be some mindless fun advertising aside, I mean, bumper cars, how cool is that! I could give a shit less if it had Gas station logos on the cars, its frickin bumper cars, over live!

Pencil $havings: Oct 10th 2006; 10:32AM

Count Chocula --
I think Sony goes to Sonic, and Nintendo gets Popeyes Chicken.

Jellodyne: Nov 15th 2006; 2:18PM

What?! No 'Eat like snake' game? Come on, people!

Seth R: Nov 19th 2006; 11:20PM

YES Achievements
200 Gamerpoints for all the achievements unlocked per game

Works on BOTH, XBox, AND XBox 360

Games are just arcade games on a disc but there fun when your bored or just want something to goof around on, but its also 600 gamerpoints alot of other people wont bother getting.

Wonder what Gamestop would give me on a "Bring 3 games, get $10 extra" HAHAHAHA

Greatest.Games.Ever.: Nov 20th 2006; 2:14AM

I am definetly buying these games. I'm pretty sure they will be par with such great games as GTA:SA, PGR 3, and Mario Party.

See you guys on Live! :D

Maile: Dec 13th 2006; 2:03PM

Just a quick question. My boyfriend is obsessed with the King and wants these games, but are they for XBOX or XBOX 360? I don't have a clue about these gaming systems! Any help is appreciated, thanks!

cheryll AR: Dec 18th 2006; 8:35PM

I don't know if the games will be good as i purchased them for kids of 7 and 6 years of age and sure they will like them. my comment is concerning the tv offer and in the blog states the games are $3.99 with purchase of value meal and i paid $4.49 per game in the houston texas area, what's up with that. Does anyone have a 1800 number for burger king becuse i'd like to to know if this is not false avertizing!!!!!