What happened to free cereal box video games?

James Brightman
6 min readJun 2, 2021

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. If you grew up in the 2000s then this is probably even more true.

Captain Crunch game title card

I used to love breakfast as a kid. The excitement of opening a new box of cereal and unwrapping a badly injection-moulded plastic toy. It used to really take the sting out of having to go to school in 20 mins.

Lightsabre cereal toys
I had the pink one.

I remember my favourite toy was a little Star-Wars lightsaber with a small puzzle inside. I’d spend hours messing with it when I probably should have been doing other things.

Trips to the supermarket took on newfound importance as I stalked the shelves looking for new playthings.

Eating cereal twice a day became normal for me, as I raced through each box, eagerly awaiting to expand my collection.

But one day, my cereal box didn’t come with a shiny plastic toy. It came with a little round disk with badly printed graphics on the top. Hardly as exciting to a kid as a figurine. But little did I know I had stumbled across an amazing, if not life-changing reward — The cereal box video game.

Game On

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James Brightman

I write about stuff I find interesting. Usually WebDev, React and occasionally Finance.