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What happened to free cereal box video games?

James Brightman
6 min readJun 2, 2021

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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
James Brightman

Written by James Brightman

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

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