"...move on to Japan, because what happens
if you put the world's best-selling handheld game machine
in the world's biggest burger chain?"
"...DSis donning the McDonald's 'M'
came with unique DS cartridges
containing training software."
"...and Mike, how exactly are they teaching
the McD's members with the...
what is it, the 'NSDS' or something like that?"
"The... the DS."
"Perhaps someone out there watching this video
knows more than we do.
But for now...
the McDonald's training game is...
...a mystery."
In the year 2010,
McDonald's Japan announced something shocking.
In March of that year, the company revealed
a brand new program to train part-time McDonald's employees:
a partnership to create an exclusive piece of software
for the Nintendo DS.
This unassuming little cartridge would then go on
to become one of the rarest Nintendo DS games of all time.
Today, I'll be telling you the story of this legendary game -
and how, in June of 2020,
one of the last known copies disappeared
into the hands of an anonymous collector forever.
Now this program was a big deal for McDonald's Japan:
the company claimed this cartridge would allow them
to train new employees in half the time
it would usually take.
It was a huge investment for the company, too:
this whole endeavor
of manufacturing and distributing these carts
was costing them roughly 200 million yen -
or 2 million dollars -
and that's not even counting the cost of developing the software itself.
And while the title of the game isn't particularly exciting -
the official name is "eCrew Development Program" -
the contents of this cartridge are fascinating.
From what little we know, the game was surprisingly robust,
with just a ton of personality, lots of custom sprite work,
and even some rudimentary 3D
for the little boxes the hamburgers come in.
"This game shows trainees how to assemble
a quarter pounder with cheese.
You can also learn how to cook fries
and clean your workstation."
- And I say 'what little we know' because,
for the past decade,
this game has been completely lost to time.
For about 10 years now,
this unassuming little blue cartridge
has been the Holy Grail for many Nintendo collectors.
While, nobody knows precisely
how many copies were manufactured -
estimates range from a few hundred to a few thousand -
one thing is for sure:
this game, if you can even call it a game,
is highly sought after.
Now, this tactic of taking something
that appeals to the young people of Japan
and deploying it as a recruitment tactic
is something McDonald's Japan has done many times before.
Among the most memorable examples would be this anime-style
"Join the McDonald's Crew" campaign from a few years back
featuring members of popular idol group AKB48.
This game is so rare, in fact,
that it even spawned conspiracy theories
that it never existed in the first place.
I've come across YouTube comments before
claiming that this game is a total hoax,
and that it's just people mixing up
some Hilton PSP game for training employees
and transposing a memory onto McDonald's.
And, of course, the existence of
that Bloomberg news report I showed you at the beginning
kind of contradicts the whole 'this game is a hoax' theory.
But, strangely, that Bloomberg news report
has remained the closest look we've ever gotten at gameplay
for 10 years now.
"And Bloomberg's Mike Fern
went to McDonald's training center in the heart of Tokyo."
"That game is a little bit trickier than it looks, actually.
If you don't get everything exactly right,
it won't let you shake your fries.
Japan, the only country where McDonald's
uses the DS to train staff..."
- Somehow, in the time since that Bloomberg reporter
paid a visit to McDonald's Japan HQ,
we have never really gotten a close look at the game
and nobody has really gotten their hands on the cartridge - or, at least,
everybody who has gotten their hands on the cartridge
has kept it completely to themselves.
...or, at least, that WAS the case until December 2018,
when a user on assembler-games.com named code1038
made the following post
announcing he'd gotten his hands on the game.
"Hello, guys.
I found this very rarest cartridge year ago,
and I'm still at same point.
I can't reach hidden menu to see 3D burger and play games.
I've tried with famous Japanese speaker to enter in it,
but unfortunatly, I need a code.
I've made this little video what I can do.
Help needed!"
Now, maybe you're confused, so I'll explain:
code1038 on this forum,
also known as Coddy Trentuit on YouTube,
had actually gotten his hands
on a copy of this coveted game.
However - and here's the incredibly intriguing part -
he had been stuck for years on the title screen
because the title screen...
required a password.
Coddy had even included a video
captured directly from his copy of the game
showing the issue, and sure enough: this gameplay video -
the only gameplay video we have
of the McDonald's training game -
is only two minutes long,
because he couldn't get past the title screen.
And while it's only two minutes long,
what's in those two minutes is unbelievably intriguing.
First off, there's this amazing opening cutscene:
And then, there's my personal favorite part:
the incredible main menu music -
which, if you listen closely,
you'll note is a re-orchestrated chiptune interpretation
of the classic McDonald's "ba-da-ba-ba-ba!" jingle.
Just listen:
But tragically, this was all Coddy could see.
Even though he owned the cartridge,
he could only watch that title screen
and get to that main menu over and over -
and had been stuck there, according to him, for a year.
Now, this in and of itself is extremely weird:
the idea of a Nintendo game cartridge
with a unique password to lock out unintended players
is already very unusual.
But the fact that this functionality was built
into what is also arguably the single rarest
Nintendo DS game ever manufactured
made the whole thing even more intriguing.
Now, making things even trickier
is the fact that Coddy refused
to share the contents of the cartridge.
In the comments of his video and all over the internet,
people have begged him to dump the game.
The comments on the video are now locked,
but in this video by the YouTuber blameitonjorge,
you can see somebody asking Coddy to please dump the rom
and him saying "that's illegal ;)".
Even going back to his initial forum thread,
Coddy said "ps: I can't share rom."
And when another user insisted
that Cody dump the cartridge, he stood firm:
"Law is law, and I've already stuff for dumping.
Sharing is still illegal by law
and I'm very strict for this point.
I've bad personal experience about illegal download.
I'm working with people who are very strict
about information sharing."
In other words, Coddy would not be dumping the cartridge
and distributing it online,
so picking the game apart inside the software
and looking for the password was not gonna be an option.
Now, while researching all this, I reached out
to a video game conservationist and translator
named Samuel Messner to ask him about this phenomenon:
why do collectors keep these one-of-a-kind games
hoarded for themselves?
"Yeah, so this is an issue that is a bit hard to dodge,
because whenever you've got something that's valuable,
the only thing that's gonna drive you
to do anything that decreases that value is altruism,
and you know, idealism, right?"
- Right.
"And you know, personally, I'm very much an idealist,
so that's what I would do,
but some people are not very into the idea
that things they have in their collection
would suddenly be worth so much less."
- Now, despite Coddy's insistence on not sharing,
the members of the now defunct ASSEMbler Games forum
did their very best to help him out:
they translated the menus for him,
picked apart his extracted game saves that he uploaded,
attempted to contact Japanese game collectors for help,
and...
nothing.
They came up completely empty-handed.
Eventually, the forum shut down,
and the quest hit what looked like a permanent dead-end.
Now, fover a year, this was where the story ended -
there was no real movement on Coddy's hunt
to get access to this game.
But then, in June of 2020 - just a few months ago -
there was an enormous development.
Over on Yahoo! Auctions Japan,
a seller by the name of nanvata_0122 was selling a copy -
an actual copy - of the McDonald's training game.
And that would have been exciting enough on its own,
but the thing that made this auction really special
is that from the photos, you could tell
that whoever this mysterious person is
who was selling the game...
actually had the password.
In all the photos of the game,
you could see it being played -
there was actual gameplay on the screen.
This person had the password that Coddy needed -
the password for this specific cartridge -
which was completely unprecedented.
Now the thing is... nanvata_0122
clearly knew what this was worth.
Because they listed this auction at a whopping 345,000 yen -
the equivalent of about $3,500 US dollars.
Still, the item description was clear"
You weren't just paying for this very rare game,
and the equally-rare
matte black McDonald's logo branded DSi;
Included in this auction was the code
required to boot the game up.
For the very first time in 10 years,
there was finally a path forward,
a way for the world to finally see what secrets
the Japanese McDonald's training game had -
but there was an enormous, 350,000-yen roadblock in the way.
Coddy reappeared, now on a new forum called Obscure Gamers,
and posted: "I found a guy on Yahoo! Auctions Japan
who has full access to menu.
I need someone to contact him and get access."
But, of course, that never happened.
No one was able to reach out to nanvata_0122 -
and, besides, there's no way this person
would be giving up this password.
And then... the auction just sat there for weeks,
with seemingly no one willing to fork up the cash
for this very, very, very rare game -
that was, until July 9th, at 9:00 PM Japan time,
when an anonymous person placed a sniper bid
at the last second, won the game... and then vanished.
That was four months ago now.
And ever since that auction ended,
nobody has stepped forward as the owner of this game.
"In 2020, one was put up for sale on Yahoo! Japan Auctions
with one of the training cartridges
and sold for the equivalent of around $3,200."
- Most people have just assumed that it went
into the hands of a private collector,
someone who's as fascinated as you and I
about Nintendo history, who has no intention of ever
sharing this precious gem with the outside world.
Seemingly, this person was perfectly content
to just enjoy this game themselves
and never let us see what the gameplay looked like.
Just as quickly as it had appeared,
the game had once again vanished -
and so too had the world's only opportunity
to actually experience the gameplay
of the McDonald's training game.
And until now, this has been where this story ends:
an unsatisfying and predictable outcome
that honestly paints a pretty grim picture
of the state of video game preservation.
But I'm here tell you that there's more to this story.
A lot more.
Because, viewer...
I've been keeping a secret from you.
See, the person who placed that bid...
The person who won that $3,500 auction
for the McDonald's DS game,
the person who now owns the only copy
with the password included...
that person...
...is me.
All right, let's back up.
Four months ago, I received a comment on one of my videos
saying "You have to make a video
about the lost Japanese DS game
made for McDonald's employees."
And while I don't normally solicit video ideas
from my YouTube comments, this idea immediately hooked me.
I had no idea that this cartridge existed,
and the more I looked into it,
the more fascinated I became by this whole thing.
It wasn't long before I found myself on a forum thread
where one user said:
"I found an auction, but it's too darn expensive. It ends on Thursday.
The thing is... when I came across this thread,
it was already Thursday.
Frantically, I clicked the auction link -
and there I was, staring down a copy of the game
I had just spent an entire night researching...
...and there were just 30 minutes left.
For that entire half-hour,
I was just pacing in front of my desk,
trying to decide whether or not this purchase
could be worth it.
I kept talking myself into it,
and then talking myself out of it, over and over -
and then, finally... I caved.
With two minutes left on the auction,
I clicked the Place Bid button,
and saw... this:
Turns out, the website I was using
had a 300,000 yen limit on my account,
and the auction was seconds away from ending.
And as I watched it slip away, I was pretty bummed out -
but also kind of relieved
that this temporary insanity that had taken over me
hadn't driven me to spend a preposterous amount of money
on a piece of McDonald's
employee training software from Japan.
With the auction over, I refreshed the page,
curious to see if some other last minute bidder
had swooped in and stolen it...
and lo and behold, that's when I realized
that the auction had been set to automatically re-list.
This meant that I now had six whole days
to formulate a plan to get my hands on this thing.
Now, maybe you've noticed
that when it comes to placing the actual bids,
I'm not doing it through Yahoo! Auctions Japan directly;
I'm doing it through another website called Buyee.
That's because most sellers on Yahoo! Auctions Japan
do not offer international shipping.
And that's where Buyee steps in:
in essence, they allow international customers
like you and me to shop directly for items
on Yahoo! Auctions Japan, Mercari, Rakuten,
and a ton of other Japanese online retailers.
The way Buyee works is that these items you buy
are then shipped to Buyee's warehouse,
packed together in one package,
and then shipped to you all as one big thing
to save you time, hassle, and a lot of money.
Now I've partnered with Buyee before on videos -
like for this unboxing of a ton of Japan exclusive
Super Monkey Ball and Mario items -
but this was different.
This time, I was gonna be asking them a way bigger question:
I wanted to know if there was any chance
Buyee would be willing to help me out
and assist me in securing this historic video game.
Amazingly... they said yes.
Now, I can't tell you how happy I was
when Buyee said yes to this proposition,
and with their help, I placed the bid,
waited, and then won the auction.
However, there was still one enormous hurdle left to clear.
See, it's still 2020, and over the summer,
as a temporary precaution due to [CURRENT WORLD EVENT]
Japan actually halted shipping in or out of the country.
See, Japan's primary mail provider is Japan Post,
and Japan Post had an enormous list of countries
who they were forbidding
all mail to be sent or received from -
and included on that list was my home country:
the United States of America.
This posed an enormous problem:
I needed to devise a way to somehow
get this game out of Japan
at a time when mailing things in and out of Japan
was strictly forbidden.
Out of options and desperate for some sort of resolution,
I knew what I had to do.
...and it's not what you think.
See, normally in a situation like this,
my solution - as you probably could have guessed
if you've seen my other videos - would be to go to Japan
and secure the package myself.
But not only had Japan
halted all mail in or out of the country,
they've also halted all tourism in and out of the country,
so there was no way I'd be getting in.
So I'm sure you can understand my predicament here:
I effectively had to figure out a way
to book a flight to Tokyo in search of answers
at a time when booking a flight to Tokyo
in search of answers is literally against the law.
Luckily, I had an ace up my sleeve.
See, around this time last year,
my younger brother Mark actually moved to Tokyo
to go to university -
and while all foreign residents of Japan,
including people with student visas,
have been forbidden from leaving
and re-entering the country during the pandemic,
my brother had just been granted special permission
to head back to the United States for a few weeks
for a mandatory medical checkup.
And by the way, just to reassure you,
he got his checkup and everything's fine.
So here's my idea:
If I could somehow get this game into Mark's hands
before his flight back to America,
he could theoretically smuggle the McDonald's DS
out of Japan in his luggage,
and the package would be secure.
For whatever reason,
I felt a real sense of urgency with this mission:
blameitonjorge's video that mentioned this McDonald's game
had shined an enormous spotlight on it,
and I couldn't shake the feeling
that someone else might beat me to the punch on this.
Now, a couple of weeks after winning the auction,
the item finally arrived at Buyee's warehouse -
but I was really, really running out of time.
By this point, it was July 28th,
and my brother's flight to America was just 3 days away -
an incredibly narrow window to get this thing delivered.
So if this item didn't arrive quickly,
this plan was doomed.
For two very stressful days,
this possibility hung over my head
that after all this work - after all the money we'd spent
and after everything else had lined up so perfectly -
a simple scheduling issue could unravel this entire plan.
Then, on July 30th,
I got this Discord message from my brother:
The package had been secured.
"So while I was packing up my stuff
to get ready to return to America here in a few days,
I am pretty sure that I heard a certain package
arrive at my doorstep,
so we're gonna go check that out.
Oh-ho-ho!
Not only is the inside of this cardboard box
an incredibly rare, one-of-a-kind make and model of DS -
it also could potentially hold
trade secrets of the McDonald's corporation.
So I'm gonna be very careful opening this.
Who knows what kind of...
This could be bugged.
I could have the McDonald's corporate team
busting down my door with riot shields any second now.
Oh, my goodness."
- With barely a day left before his flight,
Mark safely packed the McDonald's DS
into his enormous blue suitcase,
and soon he was on his way to Tokyo's Haneda Airport.
And to be honest with you, the particulars
of whether or not Mark would even be able to leave
were kind of a big question mark.
Jumping through the hoops
to get all the paperwork filled out
so that Mark could return home was an enormous hassle,
and there was no real guarantee
he would even be able to leave,
much less get back into the country.
Mark entered the airport, and with virtually all flights
in and out of Japan canceled due to the pandemic,
Haneda's international terminal was a ghost town.
Everywhere he looked, seats were blocked off
forbidding people from sitting next to each other -
a measure that ultimately proved redundant,
since almost every seat in the airport was unoccupied.
Soon, it was time for Mark's flight,
and a few minutes later,
Mark found himself onboard a virtually empty airplane
from Tokyo to the United States.
Meanwhile, halfway across the world,
me and my family were on our way to the airport
to go meet Mark and see him for the first time
since the pandemic.
I was extremely excited:
excited, of course, to see my brother
for the first time since 2019 -
something that seemed almost impossible to pull off
in the midst of COVID - but also excited
that the world would finally get a close look
at this legendary and mysterious game
for the first time ever.
We arrived at the airport masked up,
and after patiently waiting for what felt like forever,
watching handfuls of masked passengers
slowly trickle out of the gates,
finally... we saw him.
He had arrived.
It's hard to overstate
how great a feeling it was to see Mark again.
The whole situation with travel in Japan
had really led me to believe that he may not
get to see us this summer at all,
and that we may not see him until next year.
But in all the excitement of seeing Mark,
something slipped through the cracks -
something I didn't realize right away.
If I'd been looking closely, I would have noticed
that the enormous blue suitcase
that Mark had packed the McDonald's DS in...
He didn't have it.
"Do you know... your... bag didn't come?"
"So the bag is delayed..."
- Mark explained to me
that due to a baggage snafu with the airline,
his luggage had not wound up on his flight home with him.
So... I'd be lying if I said
that this situation was not terrifying.
I mean, here we had this incredibly rare game -
an item that virtually never showed up on auction sites,
a game that as far as I know, doesn't exist anywhere else
in the United States,
a game that seemingly nobody had the password to access except for me -
and we'd have to rely on an airline
who'd already misplaced it once to ever get it back.
This was a truly helpless feeling.
There was really nothing we could do here
except just exercise some patience and wait.
Well... almost nothing.
The one thing I could do... was start preparing.
See, even if everything went perfectly
and the airline found this bag and returned it to us,
that was only half the battle.
I didn't just want to own
this McDonald's training cartridge -
I wanted to document it.
I wanted to finally give the world its first up-close look
at what the McGameplay actually consisted of.
See, if I was gonna do this -
if I was gonna put in all this time, effort,
energy, and money - I wanted to do it the right way:
I wanted to capture the game as it was actually played
by McDonald's employees back in 2010
running on actual Nintendo hardware.
So I started looking into solutions,
and pretty quickly I realized what I wanted
was a 3DS modified for video capture.
But here's the thing:
In 2020, getting your hands on a 3DS capture device
is much easier said than done.
For example, check out this MLIG video from last April:
"I wish we could say we were able to show you
great ideas that you can go and try for yourself right now,
but the reality is that at this moment,
the 3DS is in kind of a bad place."
- And what they say in that video is completely true:
the availability of hardware-modified 3DSs in 2020
has dried up almost entirely.
And from doing a ton of research,
I realized that there was really only one person
left on Earth who could help me with this problem,
and that was a console modder based out of Germany
named Stefan Merki.
"Wir bieten seit mehr als zwei Jahren
Installationen von 3DS Capture Cards."
For years now, Stefan has run a shop called merki.net
where he sells capture cards and hardware mods
for the Nintendo 3DS.
This site came up over and over in my research:
by all accounts, Stefan was one of the best
and most reliable hardware modders out there,
able to install a full suite of capture devices
and other useful hardware modifications,
and he seemed like a perfect fit for this project.
So, excitedly, I went to Stefan's website
and... he had stopped selling them.
"We chatted a bit via email with Merki,
a European distributor for both Katsukity and Loopy kits,
and he tells us that he is also getting out of the game
once his existing stock is depleted.
He seems to believe that his business
can no longer count on receiving a return on investment
for additional 3DS hardware."
- Stefan had just posted an open letter on his website
announcing that he was, sure enough, out of the modding game:
retiring after seven long years
of modding Nintendo hardware for a living.
Still, I knew I had to try.
So I reached out to Stefan personally.
I pleaded with this man -
the Hattori Hanzo of 3DS hardware modification -
trying my hardest to persuade this master of his craft
into coming out of retirement for one last job.
I explained the situation to Stefan:
that I was painfully close to getting my hands
on this ultra-rare DS game,
and that I needed one of his devices
to share it with the world.
And it took some convincing, but eventually...
he agreed.
But there was a caveat:
Stefan said he would need me to send him
some American 3DS hardware to modify,
so I went out and purchased a brand new New 2DS XL
and mailed it off to Germany.
"You're left-handed, too."
- "Yep."
"We're the smart ones."
- "That's what I hear."
More on that later.
In the meantime, I also continued
to closely monitor this piece of lost luggage.
Balancing all these things:
the auction, the missing baggage,
trying to persuade a retired German modder
to make me a custom 3DS for capture -
it was overwhelming trying to keep
all these plates spinning at once, especially knowing
that if even one of these things fell through,
the whole project would likely fall apart.
Eventually, after hours of checking
the luggage delivery link over and over and over,
an update came in the next day.
- "Yeah? Wait, what's it say?"
"Airlines Baggage Information delivery info."
- "Oh, okay."
"This is from an email address called
Welcome to WheresMySuitcase.com."
- (laughs) "Where IS your suitcase?"
"Recently, your baggage was delayed
while flying into Raleigh-Durham International Airport.
You're seeing this email
because we will be handling your delivery
on behalf of American Airlines."
- "So far, so good."
"We have entered your baggage claim into our system
and are working with the airline
to get your baggage as fast to you as possible.
If all goes according to plan,
we'll get this bag by tonight at 10:00 PM."
- "I mean, this is the closest I've ever been
to this McDonald's DS.
The trajectory is correct. It's on the right path."
"It's in spitting distance."
- "It's passed so many hands, you know?
Who can really trust...
what if a little Greedy Gus at the airport
snuck his hand in there
and decided he wanted a McDonald's Game Boy?
Who can say?"
"So there's your info."
- "Thank you."
- "Oh, what?! What the...
Are you ser-...?"
The baggage had apparently arrived at our airport
and was set to be delivered to our house that night.
And then, on August 4th at 10:00 PM,
there was a knock on the door:
"Hi!" - "Hi.
This is for Mark?"
"Yep. That's it."
- "Awesome. Thank you so much."
"Absolutely. Have a good night."
- "You too.
Oh, my gosh..."
It had arrived.
-"Here it is... this is it, right, Mark?"
"Yup!
Very precious cargo."
- "Indeed."
- "We got the goods..."
"This is smuggled...
across country borders."
- "Multiple states.
It's changed hands
more times than I can count, between postmen...
Oh, my gosh."
"Everything is all jumbled up in here.
This is NOT how I had everything."
- "Well, I suspect it was packed pretty safely
by our friend in Japan, right?
Oh my God. Is this..?"
"There's part one.
...where is part two...?
Wait a minute...
- "There's no way somebody... would snatch it..?"
"Here it is."
(huge sigh of relief, laughter)
- "You never know with TSA, dude."
"I thought maybe like, yeah, there's a lithium ion battery in it...
and they wouldn't let me check it through.
That was the thought in my head just now
why they could have taken it."
- "Getting lithium batteries through customs can be tricky."
- "I believe what you have here is the charger."
- "Okay."
"I think this is the actual device."
- "Okay."
"That's based on how much it weighs."
- "All right."
- "So you haven't opened this part yet, right?"
"I haven't opened anything."
- "This is a huge moment.
Oh, my gosh.
This is so thoroughly wrapped,
and I'm grateful.
It needed every bit of wrapping here.
Okay, hang on a second.
There's something pretty interesting going on here.
You ready?
(wheezing) That is beautiful.
Look at the matte black McDonald's logo.
MKBHD would get a kick out of this, I think.
It's in such good condition, too.
Shouts out to the McDonald's employee who took -"
"So it has a cartridge? It's not just pre-installed?"
- "Oh, buddy.
That's an unassuming cartridge
with incredibly high value... and precious data.
And then what is going on over here?
What is this second thing?
So this number, from the YouTube videos I've seen
of the people who can't get past the title screen,
I'm pretty sure there's a six digit code that's needed.
Wait, there's ANOTHERone?
There's TWO? What?!
Two McDonald DSis here.
Wow, they're both like in incredible condition too.
That matte texture is so nice.
The DSi is a very beautiful and underrated device.
And then, let's see
what's the last piece of the puzzle here...
Mark, I think your suspicion is correct.
I think this is just a pretty standard DSi charger here.
Oh, my god.
Wow. Beautiful.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark."
"Yeah, yeah!"
- "and thank you, Robert, for filming."
At long last, this ultra rare game -
and, allegedly, the password for it - was in our hands:
This incredibly rare, McDonald's-branded DSi;
this even rarer McDonald's Japan employee training game;
and, arguably the most precious part of all,
the long lost, unique six-digit password
that would let us access the game
for the first time in 10 years.
Finally, at long last, the game was safely in our hands,
and that meant that there was only
one piece of the puzzle left.
And sure enough, a few days later,
another package arrived, this time from Germany,
containing the modded New 2DS XL.
This was the final piece -
this was the last ingredient necessary
to share this game with the world.
The only obstacle left to surmount was the language barrier.
I can't read Japanese, but I know somebody who can.
So I reached out to Samuel Messner again
and asked him if he'd be down to join me
for this first-ever playthrough
of the McDonald's DS training game.
He agreed.
- I'm excited to see the icon for it.
- Yes. Good point.
This is a big moment for me.
I have not actually turned this game on yet.
I've played zero seconds of this,
as has everyone in the United States,
as far as I can tell.
- Oh, my God, it's fancy.
- Dang, I kind of wish that
that was what the cartridge looked like,
because it's got kind of a "Feel the Magic: XY/XX" vibe to it.
Dude.
- [Both] I'm loving it!
- I'm loving it!
I AM loving it.
FMV!!
Oh my god.
Dude.
Happy McDonald's customers all over the world.
So this opening video was on YouTube,
but I avoided watching it
'cause I didn't want to take away from that moment,
and I made the right call.
Wowie.
All right, so we got three menu options here -
Can you help me out with these?
- Yeah. So the first one is password input.
The second is password, like change your password.
And the third one is serial code input,
which is probably what we're gonna wanna do here.
- Oh, interesting.
I feel like I'm defusing a bomb here.
Dude. I don't know if you caught that:
It's got the ba-da-ba-ba-ba jingle.
It's incredible.
It's so spiritual.
Okay, this has to be it,
because it's a six digit code that only takes numbers.
All right, let's punch this in.
Four.
Eight.
Five.
Oops.
Is this backspace in the lower right?
- Yeah, it is.
- Four, eight, two.
Such a distractingly beautiful song.
All right, here we go.
What does it say at the bottom?
- Complete input.
All right, let's see here.
Oh, no!
'What you have entered is incorrect.
Please enter the correct information.'
- This moment, in all honesty, scared the crap out of me.
My mind flooded with terrifying possibilities:
Had this DS cartridge save game been wiped somehow?
Had the seller sent me the wrong copy?
Or, worst of all: were these photos... fake?
Had we been straight-up scammed here?
- What if it's the password?
What if they set the password to be...
'Cause it is a six digit password.
- Try it. Yeah, why not?
- I hope so, 'cause I don't know what I'm gonna do
if this doesn't work.
- And here it says, please enter the six digit password
that you yourself have decided.
This is where I'm unsure whether this will actually work.
- All right. 482500.
I'm hoping this works.
Yes!
- Yeah!
- All right.
We're in.
- We're in uncharted territory, man.
- Dude.
The password... had worked.
Wow, we got the buns.
Two pickles.
That's an iconic bit of McDonald's lore.
Two patties.
I think I'm done.
Oh, it's 3D!
Now our full playthrough of this game took over an hour,
so I'm gonna spare you from watching all of that
and just show you the highlights:
- Is this my name..?
Oh my god.
All right, let's go with this guy, then.
Oh, let's get the egg.
- Oh yeah.
- Oh, this sound design is so good.
Are you hearing that?
Dude, the fact that it's like a sprite of a cow
with a McDonald's M on it!!
- 'Hey, my name is Donald McDonald.'
- Okay, how many pickles on a double cheeseburger?
- Easy.
We're now getting an isometric view of the whole store.
- Whoa.
- Oh, my god.
- Okay...
...it says that you can send an encouraging message
to someone else in the McDonald's crew.
- Dude.
Dude, that is incredible.
- Now, as we played through this game,
we just kept making discovery after fascinating discovery:
- Is that Ronald McDonald's hand?
- Way too much to put in this video.
And, side note, if you're one of the people crazy enough
to wanna watch all 73 minutes of this playthrough,
you can just click the Join button underneath this video,
and you'll get access to the entire thing
as one of my channel members.
Anyways:
It goes without saying that this was
an immensely satisfying moment:
playing through this game for the first time,
and having a translator by my side to help out.
It felt like a victory.
- It's a great piece of history that we've uncovered here,
and I'm looking forward to sharing it with the world.
- Yeah, and thank you for doing your part
for video game preservation, man.
This'll be the first video material in the world
that actually goes into properly what the game is like.
This has existed exclusively
within the memories for like decades.
Let's be honest, though.
No one was gonna document
the McDonald's DS game before you.
- However....
(dry chuckle)
About one week after I recorded my playthrough with Samuel,
I was catching up with a friend over FaceTime
and she asked me what I'd been up to lately.
So I walked her through this whole story -
the long lost game, the Bloomberg video, the auction;
the French guy, Coddy Trentuit,
who had a copy but couldn't get in
because he didn't have the password, et cetera, et cetera -
and how I had just managed to get to it myself.
And she says to me, "So, wait: that password,
was it an employee ID number or what?"
So I go to Coddy's video to show her
the exact password screen the guy was stuck on,
and I noticed something new.
While showing her Coddy's video,
I spotted something in the description
that I hadn't seen before:
a new message that had been edited in
since the last time I watched it.
In French, in all capital letters: 'IDENTIFIANTS TROUVEE' -
and beneath that,
'LOGINS FOUNDS !!' with a YouTube link.
I clicked the link.
And it took me to a livestream archive,
broadcast on YouTube, with 131 views - 58 minutes long -
...and it actually works.
He gets in, plays through the entire game,
just like me and Samuel did.
And - here's the really devastating part:
Coddy's playthrough had been streamed live to YouTube
on August 30th, 2020.
My playthrough with Samuel?
That was on September 18th - barely two weeks later.
We'd been beaten.
I gotta be honest with you here,
this was a little bit heartbreaking.
To have come this far and put in all this effort...
I was kicking myself:
If I just moved a little faster,
procrastinated a little less,
I could have been the actual first one
to document this game.
At the same time, though,
I was happy for Coddy - and also mystified by the fact
that he'd somehow gotten the password for his cartridge.
I mean, we all know how I got the password for my version;
but how the hell did Coddy get his?
Well, strap in, because Coddy's journey
to get his cartridge's password is even crazier than my own.
Over on that Obscure Gamers forum thread
from the beginning of this video,
Coddy tells the full story.
In short, he was able through a friend to meet in person
with the IT director of McDonald's in his country -
presumably McDonald's France.
Upon seeing the McDonald's DS,
this IT guy freaked out, said "don't move,"
and then brought it to the desk of none other
than the CEO - truly the 'Scott, president of Domino's Pizza'
of this particular story.
It turns out, the CEO's wife is Japanese,
and she herself had actually worked
at McDonald's Japan corporate -
meaning she knew exactly who to contact
about Coddy's problem.
Weeks later, Coddy found himself on an email chain
with employees from McDonald's Europe, McDonald's UK,
McDonald's Australia, and of course... McDonald's Japan.
This email chain, according to Coddy,
was loaded with information,
including scans of PDFs of the game's manual...
but unfortunately, they weren't able to give him a password,
as the individual passwords
were set by individual McDonald's store management.
Now, a lot of people would've given up there... but not Coddy.
He kept going.
And the actual explanation of what Cody did next
is pretty technical and honestly way above my head,
but at this point, Coddy actually dove into the code itself.
He took apart the game's ROM,
comparing the McDonald's training cartridges save data
with other DS games and began to find similarities.
Then, incredibly, Coddy made a huge discovery:
he stumbled across a string of code in the game
that contained translations
of the two-character hex code
for every single letter and number in the password screen.
From there, he kept hunting, and then found the entry
in the code for crew members...
and at that point, he had everything he needed.
The username? "LE1038".
and the password he needed?
Zero...
zero zero...
zero...
...zero...
...zero.
He was in.
I could not stop smiling when I first read Coddy's story.
This guy had jumped through
about a billion hoops and roadblocks
to solve a very inconsequential mystery -
and to me, that made me feel like he and I
are kindred spirits in a way.
But also... I'd be lying if I said
I wasn't a little heartbroken
that Coddy had ultimately beaten me to the punch.
But the irony wasn't lost on me either:
This entire time, without either one of us knowing it,
Coddy and I had been racing in parallel, neck and neck,
to the same finish line.
And, unfortunately for me, Coddy had beaten me,
fair and square, by just a couple of days.
Still, I was determined to make this adventure worth it.
I had come too far to just throw all this away
because someone else beat me to putting this on YouTube.
And after thinking about it for awhile,
I think I figured out what I can do.
See, as of today, the only two people
we know for sure have access to this game
are Coddy and myself.
And as cool as that scarcity is,
I think I want this game to be something
that everybody can enjoy -
and Cody's made it abundantly clear
that he plans to never, ever dump his copy.
After spending months on this project
and reading tons and tons of forum threads about it,
one thing I feel pretty confident about
is that people really want to see this game preserved -
both just to check the game out for themselves,
and also out of principle.
So, one last time, I reached out to Samuel about my idea,
and Samuel put me in touch
with a game preservationist named sCZther.
sCZther walked me through the process
of using some software called GodMode9 on my 3DS
to dump the game cartridge itself in its entirety.
The game cartridge itself and, crucially, my save file -
since the game requires a password.
And, after jumping through a few hoops...
...we were successful.
So, I am happy to announce
that if you or anyone else watching this video
wants to play this long-lost
Japanese McDonald's training game for yourself:
I've created a page on archive.org
where I've uploaded the ROM and my save file
and some basic instructions,
and you can download it and start playing with it today.
Have fun.
It's only recently, now that this whole thing is over,
that I've been able to reflect on just how bizarre
and uniquely international this journey was.
The quest to get my hands on this game
involved a German 3DS hacker, a pseudonymous French rival,
a game archivist from the Czech Republic,
international smuggling -
and, for the second time in my life,
the Japanese arm of an American fast food company.
I still don't really understand why this keeps happening -
why I seem fated to pursue these trivial stories
about companies like Domino's Japan or McDonald's Japan.
And though I don't know how things turned out this way,
there's one thing I know for sure:
I'm lovin' it.
(laughter)
...stupid ending.
Before we wrap up, I have three really quick notes:
first and foremost,
I'd like to extend a huge thank you, once again,
to Buyee for sponsoring this video
and for helping preserve this weird
little piece of internet history.
There's a link in the description
of this video that gives you a free 2,000 yen coupon
to any new Buyee users who sign up -
It's a great service, I've used it a ton of times,
so if you wanna thank Buyee for making this video possible,
please consider clicking this link
and checking the site out.
Also, in the time since the story began,
Buyee has opened up international shipping via DHL,
so getting stuff in and out of Japan is now a breeze.
Also, a huge shout out to Jennifer Walton,
who composed that phenomenal reorchestrated version
of the McDonald's training game menu theme
that you heard at the very end of this video.
Couldn't have done it without her.
I still laugh every time I listen to that song.
It's so perfect.
Here's a link to that if you want to hear it.
Secondly, the link to download
the McDonald's DS game rom that I dumped
is linked in the description below,
so please check that out.
And lastly: you might have noticed
that right next to the Subscribe button,
I now have a Join button under my videos.
Basically, if you'd like to support me
making more videos like this one, you can do so
for just 5 bucks a month, and get access
to all sorts of free extras
like me and Samuel's full, hour-long playthrough
of the McDonald's DS game,
commentary tracks for my older videos, and so much more.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.