Dream and Friends

As you may have heard, I played quite a few full-motion video games as a kid. This is one of the weirdest.

Kids on Site is an FMV game for children that was released for the Sega CD in 1994. It’s all about construction equipment, because kids are totally into that stuff. It has simple controls and no real gameplay — it’s basically a series of demolition scenes interspersed with brief comedy skits featuring a cast of goofball adult actors.

I’m not sure I would even call this an “educational” game, since it doesn’t really teach the player anything. It’s essentially a video game version of those “hours and hours of tough trucks and huge trains!!” DVDs that are sold for kids, and as far as I know, it’s the only game of its kind.

Anyway, Kids on Site was on sale at around the same time Slam City dropped in price, and my parents bought it for my younger brother. He played through it a few times (and, okay, I may have played it too), and I suppose it did a decent job of whatever it was trying to do. Longplays.org recently uploaded a full playthrough of the game that’s worth watching, if you’re into that sort of thing.

However, the longplay doesn’t include Kids on Site’s Easter Egg scenes, which — up until now — I’m pretty sure were only known to my brother, myself, and the game’s development staff. Today, it’s time to reveal Kids on Site’s hidden secrets.

To activate these scenes, you need to achieve several strikes in a row during the wrecking ball bowling minigame. You might never know that there’s a reward for doing such a thing — the exact same video clip plays every time you get a strike, and odds are good that you’ll move on to something else after a couple of tries.

If you’re a bored five-year-old, though, you may rack up several strikes in a row. It’s not difficult; getting a strike involves a single timed button press. Get three strikes in a row and this guy shows up.

We’ll call him Mr. Fruit.

Get six strikes in a row, and Mr. Fruit will make another appearance. He’s a great addition to the game’s cast, and you’ll learn to love him as you would love a trusted friend.

At this point, if you’ve mastered the art of Kids on Site and are able to get nine strikes in a row, the Mr. Fruit saga reaches an unfortunate conclusion.

I’ve collected all of Mr. Fruit’s scenes in the video above. Please join me in remembering him at his best, and not for what he became.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2012 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Full-Motion Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.