In what could be a minor video game “Christmas miracle”, characters besides “Mario”, “Sonic” and the various “Pokemon” are being featured in a McDonald’s promo (and not to tie-in with a movie)! After nearly 2 decades, “Crash Bandicoot” returns to McDonald’s Happy Meals! One of Activision’s biggest properties outside of “Call of Duty (and who at one time was the face of Playstation, back in the 90’s) has returned to the land of Ronald McDonald!
The video game mascot was first featured in McDonald’s Happy Meals back in 2004, in a line of handheld game machines, with characters from the series painted on them. The handhelds were similar to the “Tiger” line of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Then in 2005, a second wave of handheld games (featuring Crash characters) was released, to tie-in with the release of “Crash Bandicoot Purple” And “Spyro Orange” for the Gameboy Advanced.
Crash fans hoping for action figures (or a return of the handheld games) might be disappointed though, as the current tie-in features card games, including:
- Crash Collector Card Game
- Crash’s Memory Card Game
- Spyro’s Memory Card Game
- Crash and Dingodile Plush
- Coco and Spyro Plush
- Stack-n-Crash Challenge
- Speed Jigsaw Puzzle
- Tawna’s Tic-Tac-Toe Game
The toyline is a tie-in for the recent “Crash Team Rumble” game, a 4v4 online multiplayer arena game released earlier this year, for the Xbox One, Xbox Series S and X, and the Playstation 4 and 5.
The game has a Metacritic score ranging between 67 (on the Playstation) and a 71 (on the Xbox), which means it was largely overlooked in this excellent year of gaming. “Season 3” of the live-service game just premiered (coinciding with the Happy Meal promotion), and the newest season features the welcome addition of “Spyro the Dragon” to the game.
The Crash Bandicoot Happy Meal promotion is expected to run until Christmas (for at least 3 weeks).
