Gushers Re-Do Your Room (partially found online Flash game; 2005-2009)
Gushers Re-Do Your Room or Gushers Place was an online Flash game/website created to promote the Fruit Gushers Re-Do Your Room sweepstakes that took place in the summer of 2005.
Summary
Users would enter a lobby room, register a username and password, and were assigned a room number on a random floor. This room could then be customized with a wide array of pre-made furniture. New items could be obtained by entering codes found on specially marked Fruit Gushers snacks. An "Express Elevator" was available to allow quick access to a room you have already registered, and to enter other user's rooms if they had the right floor, room number, and username.
The game also included a unknown mechanic that would allow other users to "mess up" other's rooms. Possibly with the usage of a mystery box that would explode or "gush" goo all over the room like in the commercial.
In early 2006 the landing page was updated with an animated Fruit on the Loose button with links to other fruit snacks by General Mills. After the sweepstakes ended, the site remained online for years with no other updates, until it was finally taken down permanently sometime shortly after March of 2009.
Remains
The few remaining pieces of evidence of the site's existence come from partial Wayback Machine archives, questions on Yahoo! Answers which is currently down, and a study on children's advertising done by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation also down. However, multiple forums have had discussions on them with people sharing room codes and other conversations about gameplay mechanics like the "messing up" of rooms.
The Wayback Machine has archived the .swf file containing the opening screen and Express Elevator screen. Entering the lobby only returns a black screen, as does use the elevator for any floor, although the latter results in one of several looping soundbites of music and laughing playing, seemingly random depending on floor number. As most of the game's assets were meant to be streamed from General Mill's servers when they were in operation, it is likely the rest of the game has been lost.
However, due to recent discovery we now have the game file names as they appeared in the coding of the main .swf file.
Gallery
Images
Videos
External Links
- The first version of the site, archived in July 2005.
- A later revision, c. October 2007, with added Fruit on the Loose navbutton.
- Yahoo Answers [Archive] question from April 2007 with several usernames, floor and room numbers.
- Kaiser Family Foundation study on online children's advertising, mentioning Gushers Place.
- Chinese forum discussing the game. Mentions other users messing with rooms
- Another forum discussing the game in Chinese.