Tony & Friends in Kellogg's Land

Tony the Tiger has been bouncing across screens since the eighties, but in 1994, his platformer in Kellogg's Land got buried under such massive corn kernels that nobody really got a proper look at it. It's a shame, because this game actually doesn't deserve to be completely forgotten — it looks like a classic nineties platformer when anything was possible, even flattering a major sponsor right there on screen.

While the competition was making Sonics and Kirbys, Kellogg's built its own little world full of cereals, candy, and other treats. The goal is straightforward: jump, collect stuff, survive levels, and defeat some final enemy. It's nothing that would surprise anyone who knew Sonic or New Super Mario Bros., but for this category of educational advertisement games, it was a decent solution.

The game plays exactly by the classic platformer playbook — running, jumping, collecting points and items. The controls are simple, the mechanics don't change much during the game. When you take it holistically, playing isn't frustrating, but it's not particularly thrilling either. It just exists. The level design isn't bad, just… there. It won't remind you of anything extraordinary. The graphics move within classic DOS palettes, the sounds are what you'd expect from a promotional game.

Tony & Friends have their charm precisely in being an authentic artifact of their time — a period when sponsorship in games was written in capital letters and nobody had to be ashamed of it. These things are actually an archive of exactly what the nineties looked like. As a game? Solid average. As an artifact? Interesting.

Today it makes sense to try it only if you enjoy retro platformers in their most mundane form or if you're curious what educational games funded by big brands looked like. It will run in your browser without problems, but don't expect an experience that'll pull you back. People will play it once, then probably head off to Ghouls 'n Ghosts or maybe Lemmings.