Did anyone play Chex Quest?

I'll certainly keep an eye out for that post about favorite WADs/mods/source ports and will chime in :) It's one of the best and easiest ways to burn literal thousands of hours and still fit your budget!

I was able to find that blurb, by the way - it was indeed in the README for the separately-released Episode 3 WAD.

In 1996 myself and other employees at Digital Cafe, a multimedia production house, were approached with an unusual project proposal. Ralston Foods was looking for a simple game that could fit on a CD-ROM which they could distribute in their boxes of Chex cereal. We were very excited at the opportunity to make a game, since Digital Cafe's core business was developing multimedia presentations and websites for various companies. Originally we tossed around some designs which could be built using Macromedia Director, the primary tool our company used for software development. However when we started scoping these designs, we realized that engineering them would take far longer than we were going to be given to complete the game. So we next thought about what proven game engines could be licensed on the cheap. id Software was contacted. They had released Doom over three years before. Since then they had released Quake and were already working on Quake 2. Turned out they were willing to license Doom for a very reasonable amount. Ralston was at first very skeptical that a notoriously violent game such as Doom could be reworked to be rated "E". However a quick demo level proved that the "zorch them back to their own dimension" concept would work yet still retain the fun gameplay of Doom. They were sold and we jumped into it. Being just a freeware promotion, the budget and timeframe were both tight. Thus only five levels were designed and there was little time to even get those few completed. The intro cinematic was made by one animator in his living room. Yet we got it done and it sold LOTS of Chex cereal. Enough that Ralston dug up a few more marketing dollars to fund another five levels. After that the interest died, yet Chex Quest had entertained a lot of kids and even had some dedicated fans.

Years later Digital Cafe had ceased to exist and I had moved on to the game industry proper. Even though I have been lucky enough to have been part of teams creating AAA commercial games, I also take pride in having worked on Chex Quest. Many a fellow game artist has called me "old school", knowing I had gotten my start developing a Doom mod. I rarely went back and looked at Chex Quest though, as I was always preoccupied with staying on the cutting edge of game art. That means high-end 3D and certainly not things like 256-color textures and sprite animations. Then around six years ago I got my first email from Mark Quinn, who the Doom modding community knows as Boingo the Clown. He was telling me about his project called the Ultimate Chex Quest. He described an ambitious effort to update our old Doom game to a more modern version of Doom and fill out the remaining 17 or so missing maps with new content. He was extremely polite in asking if I would contribute some new artwork. It was a bit intriguing, but I had a lot going on at the time and declined. However I was quite surprised when I did play his mod. The levels had all been improved yet retained the core experience we had designed. Playing Boingo's mod had sparked my interest in Chex Quest more than anything had in a long time. In the years following I got other emails from fans with similar requests. In late 2007 I found myself with some spare time and started some sketches that would turn out to be the all-new flemoid, the Super Cycloptis. After creating that and seeing how it was received by the fans, I got motivated to make more stuff. Before long I had installed Doombuilder and was making maps.

As my first full map started to near completion, I made up my mind to put in the extra time and make a full-blow [sic] sequel. I grabbed the source code for ZDoom and downloaded Visual Studio Express Edition and Windows software SDK. I set a goal for myself to compile a geniune Chex3.exe for this mod. In this way I could turn this mod into an exercise in growing my software development skillset as I have never really dug into any sort of C++ programming. Granted opening someone else's project, making changes and recompiling is not hardcore software engineering, but for an artist it was a big step for me. After much trial and error and studying documentation, I finally was able to create the application this mod needed with appropriate changes to flemoids, projectiles, strings and more. This has been a fun and educational experience for me and I hope that you enjoy Chex Quest 3!

-Chukker

Cool little piece of history!