As a former Neopets kid you're totally right about the icky advertising thing lmao. Hell, Neopets in particular is the pioneer of what is known as "immersive advertising", or weaving in the ads to the game itself rather than keeping them separate. This should probably be illegal but 🤷♂️
Came here to say the exact same thing. Neo always faced some criticism for it, too, since they were a pioneer of this sketchy stuff. Another important component was that sponsored games were fast moneymakers in terms of Neopoints, so I was always like "yay, sponsored games!" or got excited over campaigns that would have cool prizes. A lot of former naive kids who are now Neo veterans agree "yeah, this was messed up" and have more of an anti-marketing stance.
what's interesting is that it WAS illegal (in the US). Reagan reversed the law in the 80's, and then suddenly shows like He-Man and GI-Joe sprung up just to sell toys
@Kaitlyn Ryan The problem wasn’t ads existing in the first place-it was the fact that they were part of the game. There wasn’t just a Crest banner ad at the top of the screen-there was the Crest Teeth Brushing Game!! There were branded items you could buy for your pets! This might sound less weird nowadays since it’s more common, but back then, Neopets was the first to popularize this kind of marketing and it was rightfully seen as screwed up.
@@Unicornmazda Obviously you don't, so why interact with this in the first place. This was the first case of this happening so it's not "just marketing" but a change of how to market with kids based sites that was really insidious. People in here are also just.. chatting about it in general, because there really isn't anything to be done about it just talking about it dude. No need to be weird and policing about it.
I played so many of these games and knew the brands because of them- but living in New Zealand meant I never actually saw the real products as a child... Until i visited the US when I was 11, and the first thing I wanted to do was try all the snacks I'd seen through flash games. (I remember trying chips ahoy for the first time so clearly!) So perhaps i am an example of someone who was actually influenced by the games to some extent!
so many of the neopets sponsored games were literally just free money, and since they were pretty shameless about being more ad than game, i didn't mind them so much. a lot of them were insanely bare bones and you could make your 3*1000np a day super quickly. sponsored flash games walked so fashion fever could run.
@@maiiau me too! I would open the window, turn off my computer's external speaker and play the video in the background as I browsed the site to avoid any hint of being influenced by ads lol
I remember “daily” lists on Neopets websites that listed ALL of these games so I could make hella Neopoints. As an adult… holy shit that was predatory advertising lol
@@deerlyXO omg lol literally. like i was part way through typing my comment when i kinda realised just how uhhhh.... bat shit insane...... the amount of """""integrated""""" """interactive"""" advertising that neopets had that i just like, completely unquestionably ignored so i could get my free fake money. AMAZING.
SAME, I tried to make my friends get into Milsberry but nobody would understand why it was appealing to me. It was literally my childhood, along with all the other flash games I used to play.
@@lisatroiani6119 yeah I think it 2022 a moshi monsters rewritten released and everyone has membership for free And every moshling that was unobtainable cuz of an event or a contest has a code now too
I played both Neopets *and* Webkinz, although Webkinz seemed more… wholesome? For some reason? Maybe it was because Neopets had so many more ads, but who knows. Maybe it was just Webkinz’s aesthetic that was more appealing to me :)
Webkinz had ads on the side of the game window, but it wasn’t intrusive to the game at all so they were easier to ignore. I agree it felt way more wholesome lol
I think describing Webkinz as more wholesome has a lot of merit to it. Neopets was a website initally made for adults and geared itself to big kids/preteens as it became a formal brand. Because of it's origin, there were some outdated references, and in retrospect, kind of offensive themes within the Neo-world. Stocks and Neo-lore also went hard whereas Webkinz was comparably a lot more sanitized.
i played both neopets and webkinz and loved them both but i feel like people are forgetting that webkinz was an advertisement for.... webkinz. the whole thing was very much HEY KIDS BUY MORE OF OUR TOYS
I'm not sure if it was flash or some other technology but the Promotional "Flash" game that stood out the most to me was Hotel 626. It was a horror game set in a fictional hotel where you had to go from room to room and do certain challenges in order to escape. There was one challenge where you had to sing a baby to sleep using a microphone, and another challenge where the game would call your real life phone number to give you instructions when running down a hall way. At the end, you just get Dorito's logo slapped in your face like a jumpscare almost. And you walk through a hallway of pictures of other players because this game takes a picture of you while you are playing. One of the most immersive scary games that has yet to be topped in my opinion. Too bad they closed it yeeears ago.
Fact: The reason why Flash shut down is because a lot of websites used this program for their login pages, and Flash is easy to hack, so people would basically steal data. Adobe shut Flash down for just that if you were wondering.
Oh my god. I saw Millsberry and immediately clicked, I played on that website a LOT, I've tried to bring it up when talking about 00's web browser sites like Neopets, but most people don't remember Millsberry........
I love how when you say a companies name or product your voice goes all robotic It’s like the perfect representation of what people running those companies probably feel like in their hearts when making this stuff
Knowing that my whole childhood of 2000s nostalgia, especially flash games, wasn't just a fever dream is always nice to know. I remember SO many of these!! The amount of unlocked memories from this channel is huge, and it's great! Surprised to not see Candystand (believe it was Wrigley branded) mentioned. I fondly remember how much time I wasted with friends on the computers during lunch in elementary school playing the monster truck games on that site! Anyway, love these vids, and all the cozy nostalgia they remind me of. Keep it up! :) (Also, Webkinz mains are top-tier 🤝)
millsberry led me to being a habbo teen in 2008 and i do not regret the experience. i think my favourite part of millsberry was the grocery shopping, but i knew i wasnt allowed to eat the cereals from the game.
Postopia was probably one of my earliest exposures to the internet (aside from maybe the Playhouse Disney website)! The brand games were always exciting to me simply because I thought it was so cool to play as mascots in situations you wouldn’t see on TV, though in hindsight, this kind of marketing definitely feels a little exploitative. 😂
Poptropica still does as far as 2023 and you can still get little limited goodies on their advertiser rooms, like costumes related to the brand, with their cute "hey kids, this is an ad" om every ad room or ingame billboard.
Poptropica is the one I remember the most, I think McDonalds had a virtual world one too in the early 2010s. I used to play a lot of games on the Hasbro site too.
I think the McDonalds one was called "McWorld World" or something like that. I really loved it for some reason and made over 5 different accounts because I kept forgetting my own account info lol. I think this was around 2009 or something. I remember vividly realizing that the toys didn't com with a virtual code anymore and getting sad, even though it seemed like I was the only one online ever, lol.
I think honorable mention should go to Poptropica advertisements. Sometimes they had full worlds, sometimes it was a location in a world, and most of the times it was a billboard between areas. It was definitely a relic of the 2010s.
God I was so upset when Millsberry died. I played that game so much in my childhood Edit: OH god I forgot about the pop tarts website. I remember that it had this like adventure game at one point where you had to find all of the pop tarts that were hiding and they became available to be found every couple of weeks, coinciding with like real-time commercials. I ended up forgetting about it so I missed out on some of the content and then couldn’t finish it because I was missing items that were no longer available…
These evolved into weird game apps and weird Roblox ad games targeting really young kids you can find Roblox "Metaverse" games advertising anything from Nickelodeon cartoons to Walmart to Fruit Loops to Dr Seuss books to Internationally successful K-Pop Girl Group Twice that debuted in 2015 and the youngest member(aka maknae) is 24 years old. What kids will have in common with Twice of all groups I have no clue JYP should've chosen a newer group that would've been more relatable with younger kids like ITZY but it wouldn't have made as much money I guess lol
The first time I ever noticed advertising in a game was on Neopets, it was some kind of maze game advertising Animal Crossing: Wild World and I remember thinking something felt super weird/off... BUT those games always earned you a butt ton of Neopoints so at some point I was seeking out the branded games more than the non-branded ones lmao
You're the first person I've seen to mention Nabisco World! I spent way too many hours playing Mini Mini Golf as a kid lol. I also have this super fuzzy yet specific memory of Axe body spray having a game, of all things. If I remember correctly, you played as a nerdy guy running around a house party collecting cans of Axe and wooing girls while avoiding angry Jocks. This was probably SUPER early in the 2000s and was more of a pop-up game on other websites rather than having you go to their own site to play it
I vaguely remember playing on Millsberry when I was like, 6-7 years old, but then it suddenly shut down and forgot all about it, until now. There was Barbiegirls, which was another virtual world site for Barbie. I played on that when I was, I think 8-9 years old too, until that also suddenly shut down and I forgot about it too. Then there was also Innerstar University, another virtual world site on American Girl. I remember getting a My American Girl doll to play on the site, when I was around, I think 9-10 years old too, until it suddenly shut down as well, and I forgot about it too.
I remember having a vague memory of some type of Nickelodeon website themed MMO where you could visit the various worlds of Nickelodeon/buy themed furniture for a personal room? And I remember overloading the heck out of it with so much items and 4+ TVs, totally forget what its called though
it's definitely nicktropolis! describing virtual worlds from the recent past that are now lost media is a trip. this is just like when i try to describe to others that the channel mtv literally had a virtual world for a short time called vMTV - no one knows what i'm talking about lol
When I was a kid, several advertisement-games were some of my favorite pass times, the first one that comes to mind is a halloween game created by K-Mart where you got to explore a haunted house and get advertised halloween costumes 👌👌👌👌 I loved playing it every halloween in elementary. Another was Nesquik where I think it might have been a skateboarding game but I remember spending so much time collecting the Nesquik bottles.
I remeber Trix had had a virtual world of sorts and loved it. Got to create a rabbit avatar or something and had an interactive world. Never heard anyone talk about it though
There was this game I used to play in primary school here in Australia, it wasn't really an advertisement so much as it was an educational game. It was about elections in Australia and how the back end functioned. A collection of minigames, really. I remember you'd go around launching parcels of vote cards at seas and it explained how overseas Australians would vote, as well as a game where you'd cross a front yard full of obstacles before having to explain to some guy how the elections work in order to get him to vote. I can't remember the name of it, and it's probably dead now. But I'd love to play it again.
flash only got truly killed off in the last few years, and gen Z ends in roughly 2010. so the youngest are 13 and older ones are in their 20s (back to 1997 about) maybe you meant gen alpha? (currently kids, no adults/teens)
I would read websites for the “free dailies” for which games would get me the most Neopoints for the least effort. I hustled like no other at that age. And now I realize that free money was all advertising… they really played me when I thought I was playing them 😂
This video reminded me of a Nesquik flash game I used to play where you played as the Nesquik rabbit who was on a skateboard and you had to click on all these obstacles in the way so he could get to the drink at the end, good times :)
I used to really love honeycombs as a kid and got into postopia hardcore. I really loved the monster fights and tried to get the codes to get more parts to use. No one ever knows what Im talking about when i mention it. The weird lips avatars too. I remember it so vividly and I'd still log in and collect codes if it was still a thing to this day honestly.
I never really played these games, I was more of a Cartoon Network flash games kid (when I could play them because we had dial-up and it took an hour an a half to load a game). And now I suddenly remember there was a DBZ flash game my friend was playing at the library once. I couldn't discern the exact goal of it, but it looked like it was (as the kids say) "fanny pack fun times" (I'm sure some kids say that. They might be the weird kids no one talks to, which makes me feel kinship with them).
One of the first computer "games" I ever played was a flash game that was found on a promotional CD handed out at some store in like 1999 before we have had a computer. As soon as we got a computer, there was a little while before getting internet or really even any software, but I was super excited about this CD because apparently it had a game on it. Well, it turned out to mostly have recipes and information about grills. I was like 4 years old and couldn't really even read, and as far as I can remember the game had a lot of text and I couldn't figure out how to play it. Somehow I still managed to have fun with it just from the sheer idea of playing a computer game.
I'm honestly shocked you didn't mention the Goldfish flash games! The Goldfish website was essentially styled to be like an entire social media platform, with the various Goldfish mascots having their own user pages where they interacted with one another. You could even make your own Goldfish character
I think I was the only child who ever gave a toss about any of these. I remember Angry Birds Seasons has a tie-in with Intel where they had Intel Core branded bonus stages, and I was absolutely obsessed with it. Then again, I was also obsessed with memoizing spec sheets for computers that were decades older than me, and the Wikipedia article for Macintosh is genuinely nostalgic, so a microprocessor themed Angry Birds game was right in my wheelhouse.
i'm so glad someone is FINALLY talking about millsberry!!! no one ever remembers it but i have nothing but fond memories of it... i really wish someone would bring it back :'(
This, but with ShockWave. I remember playing a lot of games by a company called WildTangent. They made games for different companies I liked, mostly car brands and the later iteration of Nabisco World
When playing webkinz online for the longest time had different advertisement all the time on a long banner showing the webkinz pet of the month and other things beside webkinz
My absolute FAVORITE collection of advertising flash games were the Nabisco cookie games. It was frequented by me almost as often as Webkinz. Ironically, the only game I remember the most is the mini golf, which I competitively played with my little brother
I miss millsberry so much its unreal. I remember the day their website changed to a farewell banner. I am forever chasing the high that was millsberry.
Neopets flash games were my bread and butter as a kid and one of my favorite games on the site was a top-down Crazy Taxi clone designed to sell those old Firefly phones. I also distinctly remember getting Zac Efron's voice as Link from Hairspray burned into my ears from shameless tie-in personality quiz.
Seeing that Fred Flinstone Postopia game put me right back to being in my uncle's room, using his computer while he was at work, getting poked in the leg by the weird feather down pillow he had in his chair....the memories
as a kid, this was what always turned me off of neopets tbh. i didnt quite know how to articulate why until i was older, but something about the rampant advertising always gave the game kind of an unpleasant taste to me. i played practically every other virtual pet sim on the net but just could never get into neopets in the same way
Another virtual world that was full of promotional games was Poptropica I remember there were like entire promotional islands with minigames and ads about the thing they were advertising
My fave promo game was a game based on a Sprint ad featuring cars from NASCAR's Sprint Cup Series that had these lights surround them that make them look like monsters, the game lets you play as those monster cars and let you drive and burnout in areas like an office building or a race track.
A really funny case of a promotion flash game I played was Sneaky Santa. You played as a burglar dressed up as Santa and you had to steal everything from someone's house. Ironically enough, it was made to promote a home security system.
One of my favorite flash advergames is "Frusion Breakfast Brawl", it's an ad for a product by Dannon, and it's an amazing punch out clone where you beat up other breakfast foods lol
I'll never forget how disproportionate my sadness was when I couldn't play that one weird "pet"-caring game where you took care of a mouth. Just a mouth on legs. They would develop personalities and you could dress them up to fit those personalities. I played the mini-game where my pet mouth played basketball by slinging spitballs into a hoop with their tongue religiously. I think it was on Postopia, but I could be wrong. I only found a few screenshots of the game, but searching "weird mouth game postopia" led to pretty murky waters before finding it. Rest in Peace, checkered pair of lips on knock-off Converses - you're sorely missed.
i remember webkinz clearly labeling the ads they did have in a lil corner and I don't remember the games being branded for anything but webkinz related stuff. im glad that was my primary experience of these sites
I REMEMBER PRIMARY GAMES! This channel has helped unlock so many buried memories. I definitely played a ton of Diego Smart and Beat the 3PM Slump, and I almost started crying when you showed that 3D Wonka maze with the lizard.
In the 2020s we have ads (The ones you see while on apps or games) with 2 parts. The first part is a video ad with a close button on a corner, and the second part is an interactive ad or a static banner.
Advert flash games were what introduced me to sites like addictinggames actually! One brand I religiously played that wasn't mentioned was Fandango's games. I always liked those dumb paper bag puppets lol. Eventually I'd go around and discover tv channel games (minus Cartoon Network and such) I can't really find any of the archived versions of what I used to play though.
I remember that as k kid the only brands i could recognise was the cartoon channels i watched on TV so any flash games outside of those ones i would never realize was an advertisement. Later in life i did find out that some of the flash games i used to play where trying to sell me stuff without me realizing, didn't help that i didn't know English yet.
I just got reminded of some sort of old branded social game thats for a brand i don't even remember anymore. Like i have to imagine it was *something* akin to the habbo hotel style web social games, where you could make your room, i think it some sort of hotel, but it was tied to a specific food or candy brand. Maybe even hosted on Geocities? Now that I've gone down this rabbit hole, its bugging me
I was obsessed with Millsberry. And I did the exact same thing on Millsberry that I did in real life: check out all the books from the library and read them. I was a popular kid.
No one hates Neopets more than Neopets fans, you know? I played Neopets for 7 year straights when I was just 10 years old, so let me tell you something about those ad games... They were really shady, but damn it they worked. Even as a grown-ass adult, my choice of products tend to favour the ones I would have seen on Neopets.
Shout out to the trixworld (for the trix fruity swirl cereal) platformer game, the ad islands on poptropica, and the Barbie games promoting their new movies and dolls, I might have not had much critical thinking but those games were still fun to play
Oh my god the memories this brought back... I don't recognise most of these games since I'm an Aussie so I haven't even heard of half of these brands lol, but I played the HELL out of that Omaha steaks game. So much so that I permanently wedged in my brain a little "Yackitty snackitty...!" voice clip from when you feed one of the dads a burger, which I can still hear perfectly :'D I didn't even know it was a brand game! How the hell was I living in way off Adelaide supposed to know that Omaha Steaks was a real steak... restaurant? Grocery store brand? I still don't know!!
Mcworld from McDonald’s was a staple of my childhood! You used to get codes with your toy from your kids meal that would get you stuff in the game like furniture for your treehouse! I remember there being a small little kind of caption box off to the side that stated “hey kids this is advertising” but I didn’t really understand what that meant because I was eight and just wanted to play a Web game. One day I just noticed it was phased out by the Mcplay app, and it I thought it was so lame and I undownloaded soon after trying it out, but I know it was fairly new and possibly being added to and worked on so I didn’t give it a fair chance, but I know it was no mcworld and my online gaming experience was never the same
I played on PrimaryGames as a kid, and it completely left my memory until watching this video. Thanks for unlocking something I probably never would have thought about again otherwise.
advertising using roblox games is the modern day equivalent of using flash games some have their own roblox games but ive also seen events where they advertise in unrelated preexisting games. waiting for an unrelated game to have a permanent ad in it like how neopets had it
I personally didn't play a lot of brand themed flash games growing up but I did play a LOT of games advertising movies and shows. Probably one of the earliest movie themed Flash game I remember being addicted to was this Chicken Little racing game that I found on Miniclip. I remember playing some sandwich making game for the Lilo and Stitch show, some Suite Life of Zach and Cody game and this platform jumper game for a cartoon I'd never heard of and can't remember the name of. I just found your channel and subscribed. Love these videos taking me back to the early 2000s.
Man I used to spend wayyyy too long on postopia. I also remember my old main social media website foopets used to be sponsored by purina and nexgaurd (i believe? or maybe another brand of flea and tick meds) their branding was all over the store and it was literally a required part of having a pet on there, if you didnt use the nexgaurd fast enough your pet got fleas. the feeding animation featured a big bag of purina dog food. Tho around 2015ish until the end of the site they scrubbed all brand names off? im not sure why. Other than the site losing most of its audience and not being profitable. But I feel like then they'd just ignore it rather than request to be removed?
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As a former Neopets kid you're totally right about the icky advertising thing lmao. Hell, Neopets in particular is the pioneer of what is known as "immersive advertising", or weaving in the ads to the game itself rather than keeping them separate. This should probably be illegal but 🤷♂️
Like that fuckin McDonalds on the world map
Came here to say the exact same thing. Neo always faced some criticism for it, too, since they were a pioneer of this sketchy stuff.
Another important component was that sponsored games were fast moneymakers in terms of Neopoints, so I was always like "yay, sponsored games!" or got excited over campaigns that would have cool prizes.
A lot of former naive kids who are now Neo veterans agree "yeah, this was messed up" and have more of an anti-marketing stance.
what's interesting is that it WAS illegal (in the US). Reagan reversed the law in the 80's, and then suddenly shows like He-Man and GI-Joe sprung up just to sell toys
@Kaitlyn Ryan The problem wasn’t ads existing in the first place-it was the fact that they were part of the game. There wasn’t just a Crest banner ad at the top of the screen-there was the Crest Teeth Brushing Game!! There were branded items you could buy for your pets! This might sound less weird nowadays since it’s more common, but back then, Neopets was the first to popularize this kind of marketing and it was rightfully seen as screwed up.
@@Unicornmazda Obviously you don't, so why interact with this in the first place.
This was the first case of this happening so it's not "just marketing" but a change of how to market with kids based sites that was really insidious.
People in here are also just.. chatting about it in general, because there really isn't anything to be done about it just talking about it dude. No need to be weird and policing about it.
I played so many of these games and knew the brands because of them- but living in New Zealand meant I never actually saw the real products as a child... Until i visited the US when I was 11, and the first thing I wanted to do was try all the snacks I'd seen through flash games. (I remember trying chips ahoy for the first time so clearly!) So perhaps i am an example of someone who was actually influenced by the games to some extent!
Were the snacks as magical as you had hoped? 😂
@@gravesbroderick928 they were uhhh... Something 🥴
@@ticktacktan
I just made a comment about this. If the product advertised turns out to not be good, the ads lose their influence on people.
so many of the neopets sponsored games were literally just free money, and since they were pretty shameless about being more ad than game, i didn't mind them so much.
a lot of them were insanely bare bones and you could make your 3*1000np a day super quickly. sponsored flash games walked so fashion fever could run.
I still remember the "game" where you spun a wheel three times and watched three ads got 3*10kNP. All the "how to make money" guides recommended it.
@@maiiau me too! I would open the window, turn off my computer's external speaker and play the video in the background as I browsed the site to avoid any hint of being influenced by ads lol
I used to get super excited about the one's sponsored by shows/movies that I was excited about!! Even if there wasn't much to it
I remember “daily” lists on Neopets websites that listed ALL of these games so I could make hella Neopoints. As an adult… holy shit that was predatory advertising lol
@@deerlyXO omg lol literally. like i was part way through typing my comment when i kinda realised just how uhhhh.... bat shit insane...... the amount of """""integrated""""" """interactive"""" advertising that neopets had that i just like, completely unquestionably ignored so i could get my free fake money. AMAZING.
I remember Millsberry so heavily. Nobody ever knows what I’m talking about but it was such an impressive website when it came out.
Same. My friends and I spent SO much time on that site
Literally I tried finding it years later and was so sad when it shut down. The baseball game was my favorite
I loved Millsberry!
I was obsessed with Millsberry
SAME, I tried to make my friends get into Milsberry but nobody would understand why it was appealing to me. It was literally my childhood, along with all the other flash games I used to play.
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I sunk hundreds of hours into the build a Bear virtual world as a kid. That and Moshi Monsters were my jam. Only real ones remember Moshi Monsters
i sunk so much fucking time into moshi monsters as a kid and recently fell back into that rabbithole cuz theres a moshi monsters rewritten now
@@TazKoltin there’s a WHAT
@@lisatroiani6119 yeah I think it 2022 a moshi monsters rewritten released and everyone has membership for free
And every moshling that was unobtainable cuz of an event or a contest has a code now too
YESSSS MOSHI MONSTERS AND THE VIRTUAL BUILD A BEAR WORLDDDD
I remember just never played
I played both Neopets *and* Webkinz, although Webkinz seemed more… wholesome? For some reason? Maybe it was because Neopets had so many more ads, but who knows. Maybe it was just Webkinz’s aesthetic that was more appealing to me :)
Webkinz had ads on the side of the game window, but it wasn’t intrusive to the game at all so they were easier to ignore. I agree it felt way more wholesome lol
I enjoyed both! I loved the unique neopets and the different webkinz animals
I think describing Webkinz as more wholesome has a lot of merit to it. Neopets was a website initally made for adults and geared itself to big kids/preteens as it became a formal brand. Because of it's origin, there were some outdated references, and in retrospect, kind of offensive themes within the Neo-world. Stocks and Neo-lore also went hard whereas Webkinz was comparably a lot more sanitized.
i played both neopets and webkinz and loved them both but i feel like people are forgetting that webkinz was an advertisement for.... webkinz. the whole thing was very much HEY KIDS BUY MORE OF OUR TOYS
I remember my mom banning Millsberry, Postopia, and Neopets from our house as a kid because she HATED how branded they were
I'm not sure if it was flash or some other technology but the Promotional "Flash" game that stood out the most to me was Hotel 626. It was a horror game set in a fictional hotel where you had to go from room to room and do certain challenges in order to escape. There was one challenge where you had to sing a baby to sleep using a microphone, and another challenge where the game would call your real life phone number to give you instructions when running down a hall way. At the end, you just get Dorito's logo slapped in your face like a jumpscare almost. And you walk through a hallway of pictures of other players because this game takes a picture of you while you are playing. One of the most immersive scary games that has yet to be topped in my opinion. Too bad they closed it yeeears ago.
I think some people mentioned it
Fact: The reason why Flash shut down is because a lot of websites used this program for their login pages, and Flash is easy to hack, so people would basically steal data. Adobe shut Flash down for just that if you were wondering.
Oh my god. I saw Millsberry and immediately clicked, I played on that website a LOT, I've tried to bring it up when talking about 00's web browser sites like Neopets, but most people don't remember Millsberry........
God the Build a Bear games part brought back memories I forgot I had, especially the halloween one 😭
I love how when you say a companies name or product your voice goes all robotic It’s like the perfect representation of what people running those companies probably feel like in their hearts when making this stuff
Knowing that my whole childhood of 2000s nostalgia, especially flash games, wasn't just a fever dream is always nice to know. I remember SO many of these!! The amount of unlocked memories from this channel is huge, and it's great! Surprised to not see Candystand (believe it was Wrigley branded) mentioned. I fondly remember how much time I wasted with friends on the computers during lunch in elementary school playing the monster truck games on that site!
Anyway, love these vids, and all the cozy nostalgia they remind me of. Keep it up! :) (Also, Webkinz mains are top-tier 🤝)
millsberry led me to being a habbo teen in 2008 and i do not regret the experience. i think my favourite part of millsberry was the grocery shopping, but i knew i wasnt allowed to eat the cereals from the game.
The Chef Boyardi game could have been so much better as a "Papers, Please" kind of game, except it could be like "Pasta, Please".
Postopia was probably one of my earliest exposures to the internet (aside from maybe the Playhouse Disney website)!
The brand games were always exciting to me simply because I thought it was so cool to play as mascots in situations you wouldn’t see on TV, though in hindsight, this kind of marketing definitely feels a little exploitative. 😂
Creating new stories for the mascots of consumer products does seem fun.....
..I know people have written fanfics about Tony the Tiger for example.
Poptropica still does as far as 2023 and you can still get little limited goodies on their advertiser rooms, like costumes related to the brand, with their cute "hey kids, this is an ad" om every ad room or ingame billboard.
Poptropica is the one I remember the most, I think McDonalds had a virtual world one too in the early 2010s. I used to play a lot of games on the Hasbro site too.
Yes I loved poptrpica
I think the McDonalds one was called "McWorld World" or something like that. I really loved it for some reason and made over 5 different accounts because I kept forgetting my own account info lol. I think this was around 2009 or something. I remember vividly realizing that the toys didn't com with a virtual code anymore and getting sad, even though it seemed like I was the only one online ever, lol.
!! yep with poptropica they’d love to throw brands between moving areas or had a special building to get branded merch
I think honorable mention should go to Poptropica advertisements. Sometimes they had full worlds, sometimes it was a location in a world, and most of the times it was a billboard between areas. It was definitely a relic of the 2010s.
When the hop movie was out, webkinz had a special epet rabbit that you could adopt
My younger self is so jealous of the 2000's kids who got a free Webkinz pet.
This would've been good to fucking know wtf? 🙃
God I was so upset when Millsberry died. I played that game so much in my childhood
Edit: OH god I forgot about the pop tarts website. I remember that it had this like adventure game at one point where you had to find all of the pop tarts that were hiding and they became available to be found every couple of weeks, coinciding with like real-time commercials. I ended up forgetting about it so I missed out on some of the content and then couldn’t finish it because I was missing items that were no longer available…
These evolved into weird game apps and weird Roblox ad games targeting really young kids you can find Roblox "Metaverse" games advertising anything from Nickelodeon cartoons to Walmart to Fruit Loops to Dr Seuss books to Internationally successful K-Pop Girl Group Twice that debuted in 2015 and the youngest member(aka maknae) is 24 years old. What kids will have in common with Twice of all groups I have no clue JYP should've chosen a newer group that would've been more relatable with younger kids like ITZY but it wouldn't have made as much money I guess lol
I love these videos. Its such a trip having things from the early 2000's brought back into fruition. Love your content, keep up the good work
The first time I ever noticed advertising in a game was on Neopets, it was some kind of maze game advertising Animal Crossing: Wild World and I remember thinking something felt super weird/off... BUT those games always earned you a butt ton of Neopoints so at some point I was seeking out the branded games more than the non-branded ones lmao
Millsbury was incredible, despite the advertisement. I always loved fishing and would get so sad when I fished up boots 😬😂
Thank you for reminding me what it was like to be a child in the late 90's and early 2000's
You're the first person I've seen to mention Nabisco World! I spent way too many hours playing Mini Mini Golf as a kid lol. I also have this super fuzzy yet specific memory of Axe body spray having a game, of all things. If I remember correctly, you played as a nerdy guy running around a house party collecting cans of Axe and wooing girls while avoiding angry Jocks. This was probably SUPER early in the 2000s and was more of a pop-up game on other websites rather than having you go to their own site to play it
I vaguely remember playing on Millsberry when I was like, 6-7 years old, but then it suddenly shut down and forgot all about it, until now. There was Barbiegirls, which was another virtual world site for Barbie. I played on that when I was, I think 8-9 years old too, until that also suddenly shut down and I forgot about it too. Then there was also Innerstar University, another virtual world site on American Girl. I remember getting a My American Girl doll to play on the site, when I was around, I think 9-10 years old too, until it suddenly shut down as well, and I forgot about it too.
I remember having a vague memory of some type of Nickelodeon website themed MMO where you could visit the various worlds of Nickelodeon/buy themed furniture for a personal room? And I remember overloading the heck out of it with so much items and 4+ TVs, totally forget what its called though
NICKTROPOLIS!!!!! I used to spend my whole afternoons on it
Sounds like you might be thinking of Cartoon Network's "C-Toons," they definitely had the personal room/furniture collecting aspect on their site.
it's definitely nicktropolis! describing virtual worlds from the recent past that are now lost media is a trip. this is just like when i try to describe to others that the channel mtv literally had a virtual world for a short time called vMTV - no one knows what i'm talking about lol
I love your content so much, it's so interesting to see how much I can relate to the topics you talk about, despite not being American.
I really love your channel. It gets me nostalgic for things I never really think about anymore
RIP Flash Player - so many of my formative years were cool because of you
I miss Millsberry so much 😭 It was one of my biggest childhood obsessions.
When I was a kid, several advertisement-games were some of my favorite pass times, the first one that comes to mind is a halloween game created by K-Mart where you got to explore a haunted house and get advertised halloween costumes 👌👌👌👌 I loved playing it every halloween in elementary. Another was Nesquik where I think it might have been a skateboarding game but I remember spending so much time collecting the Nesquik bottles.
I remeber Trix had had a virtual world of sorts and loved it. Got to create a rabbit avatar or something and had an interactive world. Never heard anyone talk about it though
The 2000’s equivalent of 80’s toy cartoons.
I was OBSESSED with Millsberry. It was like my first form of social media!
There was this game I used to play in primary school here in Australia, it wasn't really an advertisement so much as it was an educational game. It was about elections in Australia and how the back end functioned. A collection of minigames, really. I remember you'd go around launching parcels of vote cards at seas and it explained how overseas Australians would vote, as well as a game where you'd cross a front yard full of obstacles before having to explain to some guy how the elections work in order to get him to vote. I can't remember the name of it, and it's probably dead now. But I'd love to play it again.
Thanks for another juicy slice of content, Dream Jelly 🍮
Gen Z will never know. The internet changed so much since Adobe Flash Player died and among other things.
flash only got truly killed off in the last few years, and gen Z ends in roughly 2010. so the youngest are 13 and older ones are in their 20s (back to 1997 about)
maybe you meant gen alpha? (currently kids, no adults/teens)
Most of gen z grew up on flash. I think you mean gen alpha
I would read websites for the “free dailies” for which games would get me the most Neopoints for the least effort. I hustled like no other at that age. And now I realize that free money was all advertising… they really played me when I thought I was playing them 😂
This video reminded me of a Nesquik flash game I used to play where you played as the Nesquik rabbit who was on a skateboard and you had to click on all these obstacles in the way so he could get to the drink at the end, good times :)
Ok vid just came out guessing this has neopets and club penguin
I used to really love honeycombs as a kid and got into postopia hardcore. I really loved the monster fights and tried to get the codes to get more parts to use. No one ever knows what Im talking about when i mention it. The weird lips avatars too. I remember it so vividly and I'd still log in and collect codes if it was still a thing to this day honestly.
I never really played these games, I was more of a Cartoon Network flash games kid (when I could play them because we had dial-up and it took an hour an a half to load a game).
And now I suddenly remember there was a DBZ flash game my friend was playing at the library once. I couldn't discern the exact goal of it, but it looked like it was (as the kids say) "fanny pack fun times" (I'm sure some kids say that. They might be the weird kids no one talks to, which makes me feel kinship with them).
One of the first computer "games" I ever played was a flash game that was found on a promotional CD handed out at some store in like 1999 before we have had a computer. As soon as we got a computer, there was a little while before getting internet or really even any software, but I was super excited about this CD because apparently it had a game on it. Well, it turned out to mostly have recipes and information about grills. I was like 4 years old and couldn't really even read, and as far as I can remember the game had a lot of text and I couldn't figure out how to play it. Somehow I still managed to have fun with it just from the sheer idea of playing a computer game.
I'm honestly shocked you didn't mention the Goldfish flash games! The Goldfish website was essentially styled to be like an entire social media platform, with the various Goldfish mascots having their own user pages where they interacted with one another. You could even make your own Goldfish character
Holy crap I'm early - I've been bingeing your videos and I'm so glad you uploaded!
Nabisco and Candystand were my childhood.
Though I mostly liked the mini golf games. The course designs were really cool.
I had 100% forgotten millsberry and wow you just unlocked a core memory 👁👄👁
I think I was the only child who ever gave a toss about any of these. I remember Angry Birds Seasons has a tie-in with Intel where they had Intel Core branded bonus stages, and I was absolutely obsessed with it. Then again, I was also obsessed with memoizing spec sheets for computers that were decades older than me, and the Wikipedia article for Macintosh is genuinely nostalgic, so a microprocessor themed Angry Birds game was right in my wheelhouse.
i'm so glad someone is FINALLY talking about millsberry!!! no one ever remembers it but i have nothing but fond memories of it... i really wish someone would bring it back :'(
This, but with ShockWave. I remember playing a lot of games by a company called WildTangent. They made games for different companies I liked, mostly car brands and the later iteration of Nabisco World
When playing webkinz online for the longest time had different advertisement all the time on a long banner showing the webkinz pet of the month and other things beside webkinz
Man theres somthing so cozy about this channel. I just like to settle in with a video game and listen :)
Oh man, I LOVED Millsberry.
Fun fact, Neopets was run by Scientologists.
My absolute FAVORITE collection of advertising flash games were the Nabisco cookie games. It was frequented by me almost as often as Webkinz. Ironically, the only game I remember the most is the mini golf, which I competitively played with my little brother
I miss millsberry so much its unreal. I remember the day their website changed to a farewell banner. I am forever chasing the high that was millsberry.
Neopets flash games were my bread and butter as a kid and one of my favorite games on the site was a top-down Crazy Taxi clone designed to sell those old Firefly phones. I also distinctly remember getting Zac Efron's voice as Link from Hairspray burned into my ears from shameless tie-in personality quiz.
Seeing that Fred Flinstone Postopia game put me right back to being in my uncle's room, using his computer while he was at work, getting poked in the leg by the weird feather down pillow he had in his chair....the memories
as a kid, this was what always turned me off of neopets tbh. i didnt quite know how to articulate why until i was older, but something about the rampant advertising always gave the game kind of an unpleasant taste to me. i played practically every other virtual pet sim on the net but just could never get into neopets in the same way
i think this phenomena is the reason i get mad when mobile ads don't at least have a little demo to play
Another virtual world that was full of promotional games was Poptropica I remember there were like entire promotional islands with minigames and ads about the thing they were advertising
My fave promo game was a game based on a Sprint ad featuring cars from NASCAR's Sprint Cup Series that had these lights surround them that make them look like monsters, the game lets you play as those monster cars and let you drive and burnout in areas like an office building or a race track.
After watching two of your videos I had to subscribe love the content brings back great memories keep it up
I remember Honey Nut Cheerios Flash game it was super weird
Life Savers themed Candystand Mingolf, my beloved
A really funny case of a promotion flash game I played was Sneaky Santa. You played as a burglar dressed up as Santa and you had to steal everything from someone's house. Ironically enough, it was made to promote a home security system.
One of my favorite flash advergames is "Frusion Breakfast Brawl", it's an ad for a product by Dannon, and it's an amazing punch out clone where you beat up other breakfast foods lol
Cereal games (esp the BIg mouth and Millsberry ones) are something my inner child still craves
I'll never forget how disproportionate my sadness was when I couldn't play that one weird "pet"-caring game where you took care of a mouth. Just a mouth on legs. They would develop personalities and you could dress them up to fit those personalities. I played the mini-game where my pet mouth played basketball by slinging spitballs into a hoop with their tongue religiously. I think it was on Postopia, but I could be wrong. I only found a few screenshots of the game, but searching "weird mouth game postopia" led to pretty murky waters before finding it. Rest in Peace, checkered pair of lips on knock-off Converses - you're sorely missed.
Great video! The Neopets vs Webkinz Edward vs Jacob meme made me laugh. Fanny pack fun times 😎
i remember webkinz clearly labeling the ads they did have in a lil corner and I don't remember the games being branded for anything but webkinz related stuff. im glad that was my primary experience of these sites
I REMEMBER PRIMARY GAMES! This channel has helped unlock so many buried memories. I definitely played a ton of Diego Smart and Beat the 3PM Slump, and I almost started crying when you showed that 3D Wonka maze with the lizard.
In the 2020s we have ads (The ones you see while on apps or games) with 2 parts. The first part is a video ad with a close button on a corner, and the second part is an interactive ad or a static banner.
ive been waiting for someone to talk about millsberry!! seems like it was way more niche than i thought.
Advert flash games were what introduced me to sites like addictinggames actually! One brand I religiously played that wasn't mentioned was Fandango's games. I always liked those dumb paper bag puppets lol. Eventually I'd go around and discover tv channel games (minus Cartoon Network and such) I can't really find any of the archived versions of what I used to play though.
I loved Millsberry lol, it was sad when they shut it down. Pretty cool how Neopets is still around though!
I remember that as k kid the only brands i could recognise was the cartoon channels i watched on TV so any flash games outside of those ones i would never realize was an advertisement. Later in life i did find out that some of the flash games i used to play where trying to sell me stuff without me realizing, didn't help that i didn't know English yet.
I remember when a kid lied in computer class and said millsberry was educational so we all played this lucky charms maze game. Good times.
I just got reminded of some sort of old branded social game thats for a brand i don't even remember anymore. Like i have to imagine it was *something* akin to the habbo hotel style web social games, where you could make your room, i think it some sort of hotel, but it was tied to a specific food or candy brand. Maybe even hosted on Geocities? Now that I've gone down this rabbit hole, its bugging me
Yessss
Now do cereal CDs!
fanny pack fun times
Advertising your own videos in a video about advertising through entertaining media. Well done Ms. Jelly.
I was obsessed with Millsberry. And I did the exact same thing on Millsberry that I did in real life: check out all the books from the library and read them. I was a popular kid.
No one hates Neopets more than Neopets fans, you know? I played Neopets for 7 year straights when I was just 10 years old, so let me tell you something about those ad games... They were really shady, but damn it they worked. Even as a grown-ass adult, my choice of products tend to favour the ones I would have seen on Neopets.
Shout out to the trixworld (for the trix fruity swirl cereal) platformer game, the ad islands on poptropica, and the Barbie games promoting their new movies and dolls, I might have not had much critical thinking but those games were still fun to play
When Diego Smart showed up I had a mini freak out. You ripped a memory out of the deepest depths
Oh my god the memories this brought back... I don't recognise most of these games since I'm an Aussie so I haven't even heard of half of these brands lol, but I played the HELL out of that Omaha steaks game. So much so that I permanently wedged in my brain a little "Yackitty snackitty...!" voice clip from when you feed one of the dads a burger, which I can still hear perfectly :'D I didn't even know it was a brand game! How the hell was I living in way off Adelaide supposed to know that Omaha Steaks was a real steak... restaurant? Grocery store brand? I still don't know!!
I love your videos SO much you deserve all the love in the world 😭❤️
my life was never the same after Millsberry shut down. 😭
Thank you for unlocking a core memory with the Kid Pix video!
Mcworld from McDonald’s was a staple of my childhood! You used to get codes with your toy from your kids meal that would get you stuff in the game like furniture for your treehouse! I remember there being a small little kind of caption box off to the side that stated “hey kids this is advertising” but I didn’t really understand what that meant because I was eight and just wanted to play a Web game. One day I just noticed it was phased out by the Mcplay app, and it I thought it was so lame and I undownloaded soon after trying it out, but I know it was fairly new and possibly being added to and worked on so I didn’t give it a fair chance, but I know it was no mcworld and my online gaming experience was never the same
Oh my god, you unlocked a locked memory with Millsberry.. I used that site a lot??? The UI is as familiar to me as my own hands.
I love the animal crossing background music, but not as much as fanny pack fun times.
I played on PrimaryGames as a kid, and it completely left my memory until watching this video. Thanks for unlocking something I probably never would have thought about again otherwise.
I’ve had a shit day at work. This is a nice thing to relax and decompress to. Your content is really great.
advertising using roblox games is the modern day equivalent of using flash games
some have their own roblox games but ive also seen events where they advertise in unrelated preexisting games. waiting for an unrelated game to have a permanent ad in it like how neopets had it
I personally didn't play a lot of brand themed flash games growing up but I did play a LOT of games advertising movies and shows.
Probably one of the earliest movie themed Flash game I remember being addicted to was this Chicken Little racing game that I found on Miniclip.
I remember playing some sandwich making game for the Lilo and Stitch show, some Suite Life of Zach and Cody game and this platform jumper game for a cartoon I'd never heard of and can't remember the name of.
I just found your channel and subscribed. Love these videos taking me back to the early 2000s.
Man I used to spend wayyyy too long on postopia.
I also remember my old main social media website foopets used to be sponsored by purina and nexgaurd (i believe? or maybe another brand of flea and tick meds) their branding was all over the store and it was literally a required part of having a pet on there, if you didnt use the nexgaurd fast enough your pet got fleas. the feeding animation featured a big bag of purina dog food. Tho around 2015ish until the end of the site they scrubbed all brand names off? im not sure why. Other than the site losing most of its audience and not being profitable. But I feel like then they'd just ignore it rather than request to be removed?