McDonald's eCrew Development Program (found McDonald's Japan Nintendo DS training game; 2010)

The game's title screen.

Status: Found

Date found: 18 Nov 2020

McDonald's eCrew Development Program is a game used by Japanese McDonald's to train their employees.

History

In 2010, McDonald's Japan collaborated with Nintendo to create eCrew Development Program, a Nintendo DS game designed to train new employees. The game received some media coverage, but it was only given to McDonald's Japan employees and required an individualized password to play.

In December 2018, a thread was started on the AssemblerGames website by user Code1038, who had bought the game cartridge years earlier. Code1038 was stuck on a password entry page and could not progress past that point, as he had no way of figuring out the copy's individualized password.

In mid-2020, a Yahoo Japan auction for the game appeared online. Its starting price was 400,000 yen (about $3,855 in US dollars), which was later lowered.^[1]

Subsequently, Code1038 had been in contact with numerous members of international McDonald's staff in an attempt to access his copy of the game. While he was provided with scans of the game manual and other information, he still had no way of accessing the full game due to the nature of the individualized passwords. However, upon inspection of the game's code, Code1038 was able to figure out the password for his copy and uploaded a full playthrough to YouTube on October 30th, 2020. Despite having full access to the game and its password, Code1038 made it clear that he had no intention of dumping the game and distributing it to the public.

On November 18th, 2020, YouTuber Nick Robinson shared a video (below) where he revealed that he was the winner of the Yahoo auction. After playing the game on a livestream, he subsequently dumped the entire game and uploaded it onto the Internet Archive.