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.

I didn’t have anything new to post about this month, but in a shocking recent development, Dream and Friends reader and Slam City with Scottie Pippen evangelist sebmal has become the second person in the world to beat Scottie Pippen in an FMV basketball match.

Also, here’s a Slam City dance party.

This is inspiring. Clearly, there is much work to be done in the field of Sega CD documentation.

How do you make a gambling sim interesting?

The rules for traditional gambling games are firmly established, and there isn’t much you can do to make them more exciting. Nowadays, you can appeal to a broad audience with mobile apps, online multiplayer modes, and social networking features, but I’d imagine that it was quite a challenge back in the ’80s and ’90s.

This was the problem developer Point of View faced when creating Golden Nugget for the original PlayStation. Their solution? The game shipped with an interactive full-motion video thriller starring Adam West.

Strangely, this feature is only mentioned briefly on the back of the game’s jewel case, and you could easily overlook the fact that it exists at all. The game dumps you into a standard gambling simulation mode at startup, and the “start adventure” option is buried in an obscure menu in a part of the casino you might never visit.

Golden Nugget’s adventure mode isn’t a last-minute throwaway addition, though; it features more than half an hour’s worth of live-action video, forcing the game to be released as a two-disc set. It was filmed entirely at the Golden Nugget Las Vegas casino, too. Its existence is both puzzling and fascinating.

Golden Nugget’s gameplay is nothing special, but the video segments are really something else. In the game, you play as a professional gambler, and Adam West is “Hugh Swain,” who is basically Batman. There’s some story about a stolen computer chip and chaos theory and…look, you really need to see this. I stitched together all of Golden Nugget’s FMV sequences below. Watch it all. It’s worth it.