McDonald Land

Ronald McDonald on your computer. In 1992, that sounded like the cheapest marketing move ever to land on a floppy disk — and in a way, it was. Still, I fired up the game, let the intro screen scroll by, and spent the afternoon jumping through trees instead of doing something sensible.

McDonald Land is a platformer set in the colorful fast-food world of Virgin's 1992 release. No story worth mentioning — McDonald's needed a game, Virgin delivered one. MS-DOS platform, four colors or sixteen, depending on what your machine had to offer. Genre-wise, it's a faithful copy of the console school: horizontal scrolling, item collection, obstacle jumping, no shooting.

Mechanically, the game works exactly as you'd expect — move left, move right, jump. The levels are designed as open spaces with no time limit, so nobody's rushing you. Back when every platformer was copying arcade roots with countdown timers, that was a pretty refreshing approach. You hop from block to block, branch to branch, collecting what you can. Keyboard controls on PC aren't ideal — they never were — but you get used to it. The difficulty is mild; the game is clearly aimed at kids.

What I remember most isn't the gameplay itself, but that strange corporate-optimism atmosphere encoded into every pixel. Everything is round, yellow, red, safe. It's McDonald's in software form — and that's exactly how it looks and plays. Virgin did solid technical work, the graphics hold up for DOS-era standards, the Sound Blaster music does its job and won't stick in your head longer than twenty minutes after you shut it down. The game hasn't aged particularly badly or particularly gloriously. It simply remained exactly what it was — a premium advertisement in EXE format.

Today it'll mainly appeal to video game marketing collectors and people who grew up in the first half of the nineties with an irrational sentimental attachment to Ronald. As a representation of the genre, there's no point recommending it over dozens of better platformers from the same era. As a curiosity — a corporate game that at least didn't apologize for what it was — it has its place. You can finish it in your browser in an afternoon, you won't curse the controls, and you'll walk away with the feeling that you've witnessed a time when McDonald's believed that owning a computer game was a good idea. Maybe they were right.