The 10-Year Hunt for the Lost McDonald's DS Game

move on to japan because what happens if you put the world's best-selling handheld game machine in the world's biggest burger chain flak dsis donning the mcdonald's m came with unique ds cartridges containing training software and mike how exactly are they teaching the uh mcds members with the and was it the nsds or something like that the ds perhaps someone out there watching this video knows more than we do but for now the mcdonald's training game is a mystery in the year 2010 mcdonald's japan announced something shocking in march of that year the company revealed a brand new program to train part-time mcdonald's employees a partnership to create an exclusive piece of software for the nintendo ds this unassuming little cartridge would then go on to become one of the rarest nintendo ds games of all time today i'll be telling you the story of this legendary game and how in june of 2020 one of the last known copies disappeared into the hands of an anonymous collector forever now this program was a big deal for mcdonald's japan the company claimed that this cartridge would allow them to train new employees in half the time it would usually take it was a huge investment for the company too this whole endeavor of manufacturing and distributing these carts was costing them roughly 200 million yen or two million dollars and that's not even counting the cost of developing the software itself and while the title of the game isn't particularly exciting the official name is ecru development program the contents of this cartridge are fascinating from what little we know the game was surprisingly robust with just a ton of personality a lots of custom sprite work and even some rudimentary 3d for the little boxes the hamburgers come in this game shows trainees how to assemble a quarter pounder with cheese you can also learn how to cook fries and clean your workstation and i say what little we know because for the past decade this game has been completely lost to time for about 10 years now this unassuming little blue cartridge has been the holy grail for many nintendo collectors while nobody knows precisely how many copies were manufactured estimates range from a few hundred to a few thousand one thing is for sure this game if you can even call it a game is highly sought after now this tactic of taking something that appeals to the young people of japan and deploying it as a recruitment tactic is something mcdonald's japan has done many times before among the most memorable examples would be this anime style join the mcdonald's crew campaign from a few years back featuring members of popular idol group akb48 this game is so rare in fact that it even spawned conspiracy theories that it never existed in the first place i've come across youtube comments before claiming that this game is a total hoax and it's just people mixing up some hilton psp game for training employees and transposing a memory onto mcdonald's and of course the existence of that bloomberg news report i showed you at the beginning kind of contradicts the whole this game is a hoax theory but strangely that bloomberg news report has remained the closest look we've ever gotten at gameplay for 10 years now and bloomberg's mike fern went to mcdonald's training center in the heart of tokyo and that game is a little bit trickier than it looks actually if you don't get everything exactly right it won't let you shake your fries japan the only country where mcdonald's uses the ds to train staff somehow in the time since that bloomberg reporter paid a visit to mcdonald's japan hq we have never really gotten a close look at the game and nobody has really gotten their hands on the cartridge or at least everybody who has gotten their hands on the cartridge has kept it completely to themselves or at least that was the case until december 2018 when a user on assemblergames.com named code1038 made the following post announcing he'd gotten his hands on the game hello guys i found this very rarest cartridge year ago and i'm still at same point i can't reach hidden menu to see 3d burger and play games i've tried with famous japanese speaker to enter in it but unfortunately i need a code i've made this little video what i can do help needed now maybe you're confused so i'll explain code 1038 on this forum also known as codytontweet on youtube had actually gotten his hands on a copy of this coveted game however and here's the incredibly intriguing part he had been stuck for years on the title screen because the title screen required a password cody had even included a video captured directly from his copy of the game showing the issue and sure enough this gameplay video the only gameplay video we have of the mcdonald's training game is only two minutes long because he couldn't get past the title screen and while it's only two minutes long what's in those two minutes is unbelievably intriguing first off there's this amazing opening cut scene and then there's my personal favorite part the incredible main menu music which if you listen closely you'll note is a reorchestrated chiptune interpretation of the classic mcdonald's jingle just listen but tragically this was all cody could see even though he owned the cartridge he could only watch that title screen and get to that main menu over and over and had been stuck there according to him for a year now this in and of itself is extremely weird the idea of a nintendo game cartridge with a unique password to lock out unintended players is already very unusual but the fact that this functionality was built into what is also arguably the single rarest nintendo ds game ever manufactured made the whole thing even more intriguing now making things even trickier is the fact that cody refused to share the contents of the cartridge in the comments of his video and all over the internet people have begged him to dump the game the comments on the video are now locked but in this video by the youtuber blame it on george you can see somebody asking cody to please dump the rom and him saying smiley face that's illegal smiley face even going back to his initial forum thread cody said ps i can't share wrong and when another user insisted that cody dump the cartridge he stood firm quote law is law and i've already stuffed for dumping sharing is still illegal by law and i'm very strict for this point i've bad personal experience about illegal download i'm working with people who are very strict about information sharing in other words cody would not be dumping the cartridge and distributing it online so picking the game apart inside the software and looking for the password was not going to be an option now while researching all this i reached out to a video game conservationist and translator named samuel messner to ask him about this phenomenon why do collectors keep these one-of-a-kind games hoarded for themselves yeah so this is um an issue that is a bit hard to dodge because whenever you've got something that's valuable the only thing that's gonna drive you to do anything that decreases that value is uh altruism and uh you know idealism right uh and you know personally i'm very much an idealist so that's what i would do but some people you know are not very into the idea that things they have in the collection would suddenly be worth so much less now despite cody's insistence on not sharing the members of the now defunct assembler games forum did their very best to help him out they translated the menus for him picked apart his extracted game saves that he uploaded attempted to contact japanese game collectors for help and nothing they came up completely empty-handed eventually the forum shut down and the quest hit what looked like a permanent dead end now for over a year this was where this story ended there was no real movement on cody's hunt to get access to this game but then in june of 2020 just a few months ago there was an enormous development over on yahoo auctions japan a seller by the name of nanvata0122 was selling a copy an actual copy of the mcdonald's training game and that would have been exciting enough on its own but the thing that made this auction really special is that from the photos you could tell that whoever this mysterious person is who was selling the game actually had the password in all the photos of the game you could see it being played there was actual gameplay on the screen this person had the password that cody needed the password for this specific cartridge which was completely unprecedented now the thing is non-vada0122 clearly knew what this was worth because they listed this auction at a whopping 345 000 yen the equivalent of about 3.5 000 us dollars still the item description was clear you weren't just paying for this very rare game and the equally rare matte black mcdonald's logo branded dsi included in this auction was the code required to boot the game up for the very first time in 10 years there was finally a path forward a way for the world to finally see what secrets the japanese mcdonald's training game had but there was an enormous 350 000 yen roadblock in the way cody reappeared now on a new forum called obscure gamers and posted i've found a guy on yahoo auctions japan who has full access to menu i need someone to contact him and get access but of course that never happened no one was able to reach out to nanva0122 and besides there's no way this person would be giving up this password and then the auction just sat there for weeks with seemingly no one willing to fork up the cash for this very very very rare game that was until july 9th at 9 00 pm japan time when an anonymous person placed a sniper bid at the last second won the game and then vanished that was four months ago now and ever since that auction ended nobody has stepped forward as the owner of this game in 2020 one was put up for sale on yahoo japan auctions with one of the training cartridges and sold for the equivalent of around 200 most people have just assumed that it went into the hands of a private collector someone who's as fascinated as you and i about nintendo history who has no intention of ever sharing this precious gem with the outside world seemingly this person was perfectly content to just enjoy this game themselves and never let us see what the gameplay looked like just as quickly as it appeared the game had once again vanished and so too had the world's only opportunity to actually experience the gameplay of the mcdonald's training game and until now this has been where this story ends an unsatisfying and predictable outcome that honestly paints a pretty grim picture of the state of video game preservation but i'm here to tell you that there's more to this story a lot more because viewer i've been keeping a secret from you see the person who placed that bid the person who won that 3 500 auction for the mcdonald's bs game the person who now owns the only copy with a password included that person is me all right let's back up four months ago i received a comment on one of my videos saying you have to make a video about the lost japanese ds game made for mcdonald's employees and while i don't normally solicit video ideas from my youtube comments this idea immediately hooked me i had no idea that this cartridge existed and the more i looked into it the more fascinated i became by this whole thing it wasn't long before i found myself on a forum thread where one user said i found an auction but it's too darn expensive it ends on thursday the thing is when i came across this thread it was already thursday frantically i clicked the auction link and there i was staring down a copy of the game i had just spent an entire night researching and there were just 30 minutes left for that entire half hour i was just pacing in front of my desk trying to decide whether or not this purchase could be worth it i kept talking myself into it and then talking myself out of it over and over and then finally i caved with two minutes left on the auction i clicked the place bid button and saw this turns out the website i was using had a 300 000 yen limit on my account and the auction was seconds away from ending and as i watched it slip away i was pretty bummed out but also kind of relieved that this temporary insanity that had taken over media hadn't driven me to spend a preposterous amount of money on a piece of mcdonald's employee training software from japan with the auction over i refreshed the page curious to see if some other last minute bidder had swooped in and stolen it and lo and behold that's when i realized that the auction had been set to automatically re-list this meant that i now had six whole days to formulate a plan to get my hands on this thing now maybe you've noticed that when it comes to placing the actual bids i'm not doing it through yahoo auctions japan directly i'm doing it through another website called bai that's because most sellers on yahoo auctions japan do not offer international shipping and that's where bae steps in in essence they allow international customers like you and me to shop directly for items on yahoo auction japan mirkari rakuten and a ton of other japanese online retailers the way bai works is that these items you buy are then shipped to buye's warehouse packs together in one package and then ships to you all as one big thing to save you time hassle and a lot of money now i've partnered with bae before on videos like for this unboxing of a ton of japan exclusive super monkey ball and mario items but this was different this time i was going to be asking them a way bigger question i wanted to know if there was any chance by would be willing to help me out and assist me in securing this historic video game amazingly they said yes now i can't tell you how happy i was when i said yes to this proposition and with their health i placed the bid waited and then won the auction however there was still one enormous hurdle left to clear see it's still 2020 and over the summer as a temporary precaution due to current world events japan actually halted shipping in or out of the country see japan's primary mail provider is japan post and japan post had an enormous list of countries who they were forbidding all mail to be sent or received from and included on that list was my home country the united states of america this posed an enormous problem i needed to devise a way to somehow get this game out of japan at a time when mailing things in and out of japan was strictly forbidden out of options and desperate for some sort of resolution i knew what i had to do and it's not what you think see normally in a situation like this my solution as you probably could have guessed if you've seen my other videos would be to go to japan and secure the package myself but not only had japan halted all male in or out of the country they've also halted all tourism in and out of the country so there was no way i'd be getting in so i'm sure you can understand my predicament here i effectively had to figure out a way to book a flight to tokyo in search of answers at a time when booking a flight to tokyo in search of answers is literally against the law luckily i had an ace up my sleeve see around this time last year my younger brother mark actually moved to tokyo to go to university and while all foreign residents of japan including people with student visas have been forbidden from leaving and re-entering the country during the pandemic my brother had just been granted special permission to head back to the united states for a few weeks for a mandatory medical checkup and by the way just to reassure you he got his checkup and everything's fine so here's my idea if i could somehow get this game into mark's hands before his flight back to america he could theoretically smuggle the mcdonald's ds out of japan in his luggage and the package would be secure now for whatever reason i felt a real sense of urgency with this mission blaming on george's video that mentioned this mcdonald's game had shined an enormous spotlight on it and i couldn't shake the feeling that someone else might beat me to the punch on this now a couple weeks after winning the auction the item finally arrived at buy's warehouse but i was really really running out of time by this point it was july 28th and my brother's flight to america was just three days away an incredibly narrow window to get this thing delivered so if this item didn't arrive quickly this plan was doomed for two very stressful days this possibility hung over my head that after all this work after all the money we'd spent and after everything else had lined up so perfectly a simple scheduling issue could unravel this entire plan then on july 30th i got this discord message from my brother the package had been secured so while i was packing up my stuff to get ready to uh return to america here in a few days i am pretty sure that i heard a certain package arrive at my doorstep so we're gonna go check that out not only is the inside of this cardboard box an incredibly rare one-of-a-kind make and model of ds it also could potentially hold trade secrets of the mcdonald's corporation so i'm gonna be very careful opening this you know you know who knows what kind of i think this could be bugged maybe we could i could have the mcdonald's corporate team busting down my door with riot shields any second now oh my goodness with barely a day left before his flight mark safely packed the mcdonald's ds into his enormous blue suitcase and soon he was on his way to tokyo's haneda airport and to be honest with you the particulars of whether or not mark would even be able to leave were kind of a big question mark jumping through the hoops to get all the paperwork filled out so that mark could return home was an enormous hassle and there was no real guarantee he would even be able to leave much less get back into the country mark entered the airport and with virtually all flights in and out of japan cancelled due to the pandemic hanada's international terminal was a ghost town everywhere he looked seats were blocked off forbidding people from sitting next to each other a measure that ultimately proved redundant since almost every scene in the airport was unoccupied soon it was time for mark's flight and a few minutes later mark found himself on board a virtually empty airplane from tokyo to the united states meanwhile halfway across the world me and my family were on our way to the airport to go meet mark and see him for the first time since the pandemic i was extremely excited excited of course to see my brother for the first time since 2019 something that seemed almost impossible to pull off in the midst of kovid but also excited that the world would finally get a close look at this legendary and mysterious game for the first time ever we arrived at the airport masked up and after patiently waiting for what felt like forever watching handfuls of masked passengers slowly trickle out of the gates finally we saw him he had arrived it's hard to overstate how great a feeling it was to see mark again the whole situation with travel in japan had really led me to believe that he may not get to see us this summer at all and that we may not see him until next year but in all the excitement of seeing mark something slipped through the cracks something i didn't realize right away if i'd been looking closely i would have noticed that the enormous blue suitcase that mark had packed the mcdonald's ds in he didn't have it do you know that your bag is not with didn't come so the bag is delayed mark explained to me that due to a baggage snafu with the airline his luggage had not wound up on his flight home with him so i'd be lying if i said that this situation was not terrifying i mean here we had this incredibly rare game an item that virtually never showed up on auction sites a game that as far as i know doesn't exist anywhere else in the united states a game that seemingly nobody had the password to access except for me and we'd have to rely on an airline who'd already misplaced it once to ever get it back this was a truly helpless feeling there was really nothing we could do here except just exercise some patience and wait well almost nothing the one thing i could do was start preparing see even if everything went perfectly and the airline found this bag and returned it to us that was only half the battle i didn't just want to own this mcdonald's training cartridge i wanted to document it i wanted to finally give the world its first up close look at what the mcgameplay actually consisted of see if i was gonna do this if i was gonna put in all this time effort energy and money i wanted to do it the right way i wanted to capture the game as it was actually played by mcdonald's employees back in 2010 running on actual nintendo hardware so i started looking into solutions and pretty quickly i realized what i wanted was a 3ds modified for video capture but here's the thing in 2020 getting your hands on a 3ds capture device is much easier said than done for example check out this mlig video from last april i wish we could say we were able to show you great ideas that you can go and try for yourself right now but the reality is that at this moment the 3ds is in kind of a bad place and what they say in that video is completely true the availability of hardware modified 3ds in 2020 has dried up almost entirely and from doing a ton of research i realized that there was really only one person left on earth who could help me with this problem and that was a console modder based out of germany named stefan merkel for years now stefan has run a shop called mariki.net where he sells capture cards and hardware mods for the nintendo 3ds this site came up over and over in my research by all accounts stefan was one of the best and most reliable hardware modders out there able to install a full suite of capture devices and other useful hardware modifications and he seemed like a perfect fit for this project so excitedly i went to stefan's website and he had stopped selling them we chatted a bit via email with murky a european distributor for both katsukiti and loopy kits and he tells us that he's also getting out of the game once his existing stock is depleted he seems to believe that his business can no longer count on receiving a return on investment for additional 3ds hardware stefan had just posted an open letter on his website announcing that he was sure enough out of the modding game retiring after seven long years of modding nintendo hardware for a living still i knew i had to try so i reached out to stefan personally i pleaded with this man the hattori hanzo of 3ds hardware modification trying my hardest to persuade this master of his craft into coming out of retirement for one last job i explained the situation to staphon that i was painfully close to getting my hands on this ultra rare ds game and that i needed one of his devices to share with the world and it took some convincing but eventually he agreed but there was a caveat stefan said he would need me to send him some american 3ds hardware to modify so i went out and purchased a brand new new 2d sxl and mailed it off to germany you're left-handed too yep that's what i hear more on that later in the meantime i also continued to closely monitor this piece of lost luggage balancing all these things the auction the missing baggage trying to persuade a retired german modder to make me a custom 3ds for capture it was overwhelming trying to keep all these plates spinning at once especially knowing that if even one of these things fell through the whole project would likely fall apart eventually after hours of checking the luggage delivery link over and over and over an update came in the next day yeah wait what does it say airlines baggage information delivery info oh okay this is from an email address called welcome to where'smysuitcase.com where is where is your suitcase recently your baggage was delayed while flying into raleigh-durham international airport you're seeing this email because we will be handling your delivery on behalf of american airlines we have entered your baggage claim into our system we are working with the airline to get your baggage as fast to you as possible if all goes according to plan we'll get this bag by tonight at 10 pm i mean this is the closest i've ever been to this mcdonald's ds we are the trajectory is correct it's on the right path it's in spitting distance it's just it's past so many hands you know who can really trust what if a little greedy gus at the airport snuck his hand in there and decided he wanted a mcdonald's game boy who can say all right there's your info thank you waves russell playing monkey ball upstairs oh what what the the baggage had apparently arrived at our airport and was set to be delivered to our house that night and then on august 4th at 10 p.m there was a knock on the door hi this is uh for mark uh yes yep that's it awesome thank you so much have a good night you too oh my gosh did it arrive here it is oh this is it right mark yep very precious cargo indeed you got the goods this is smuggled across country borders multiple states it's it's changed hands more times than i can count between postman oh my gosh everything is all jumbled up in here this is not how i had everything i suspect it was packed pretty safely by our our friend in japan right oh my god is this there's part one there's part two wait a minute there's no way somebody would snatch it here it is you never know what tsa dude maybe like yeah there's a lithium ion battery in it right wouldn't let me check it through and maybe that was the thought in my head just now yeah getting lithium batteries through customs can be tricky i believe what you have here is the charger okay i think this is the actual device okay that's based on how much it weighs all right so you haven't opened this part yet right i haven't opened anything this is this is a huge moment oh my gosh this is so thoroughly wrapped i'm really and i'm grateful it needed every every bit of wrapping here okay hang on a second there's something pretty interesting going on here you ready that is beautiful look at the matte black mcdonald's logo you know mkbhd would get a kick out of this i think it's in such good condition too shout out to the mcdonald's employee who took so it has a cartridge it's not just pre-installed oh buddy that's what she's an unassuming cartridge with incredibly high value and and precious data and then what is going on over here why why is is the second thing i'm so this number from the youtube videos i've seen of the people who can't get past the title screen i'm pretty sure there's a six-digit code that's needed wait there's another one there's two what two mcdonald's dsis here wow they're both they're both like in incredible condition too that matte texture is so nice the dsi is a very beautiful and underrated device and then let's see what's the the last piece of the puzzle here yeah mark i think your suspicion is correct i think this is just a yeah pretty standard dsi charger here oh my god wow beautiful thank you thank you so much mark yeah yeah thank you robert for filming at long last this ultra rare game and allegedly the password for it was in our hands this incredibly rare mcdonald's branded dsi this even rarer mcdonald's japan employee training game and arguably the most precious part of all the long-lost unique six-digit password that would let us access the game for the first time in 10 years finally at long last the game was safely in our hands and that meant that there was only one piece of the puzzle left and sure enough a few days later another package arrived this time from germany containing the modded new 2dsxl this was the final piece this was the last ingredient necessary to share this game with the world the only obstacle left to surmount was the language barrier i can't read japanese but i know somebody who can so i reached out to samuel messner again and asked him if he'd be down to join me for this first ever playthrough of the mcdonald's ds training game he agreed and i'm excited to see the icon for it yeah yes good point this is a big moment for me i have not actually turned this game on yet i've played zero seconds of this uh as has everyone in the united states as far as i can tell oh my god it's fancy damn i kind of wish that that was what the cartridge looks like because it's got kind of a feel the magic xyx vibe to it dude i can't i'm loving it i'm loving it i am loving it wow fmv oh my god dude happy mcdonald's customers all over the world so this opening video was on youtube but i avoided watching it because i didn't want to take away from that moment and i made the right call wowie all right so we got three menu options here can you help me help me out with these yeah so the first one is a password input the second is a password uh like change your password and the third one is serial code input which is probably what we're going to want to do here oh interesting i feel like i'm defusing a bomb here dude i don't know i don't know if you caught that it's got the bajangle it's incredible it's so spiritual okay this has to be it because it's a six-digit code that only takes numbers all right let's let's punch this in four eight five oops is this backspace in the lower right yeah it is four eight two such a distractingly beautiful song alright here we go what does it say at the bottom complete input all right let's see here oh no um the uh what you have entered is incorrect please uh enter the correct information this moment in all honesty scared the crap out of me my mind flooded with terrifying possibilities had this ds cartridge save game been wiped somehow had the seller sent me the wrong copy or worst of all were these photos fake had we been straight up scammed here what if it's the password what if they set the password to be because it is a six digit password try it yeah why not i hope i hope so because i don't know what i'm gonna do if this doesn't work okay and here it says please enter the six digit password that you yourself have decided this is where i'm i'm unsure whether whether this will actually work all right four eight two five zero zero i'm hoping this works yes yes all right we're in we're in uncharted territory man dude the password had worked wow we got the buns two pickles is a that's an iconic bit of mcdonald's lures two patties i think i'm done oh it's 3d now our full playthrough of this game took over an hour so i'm going to spare you from watching all of that and just show you the highlights is this my name oh my god all right let's let's let's go with this guy then oh let's get the egg oh yeah oh this sound design is so good are you hearing that dude the fact that it's like a sprite of a cow with a mcdonald's m on it hey my name is donald mcdonald okay um how many pickles on a double cheeseburger easy we're not getting an isometric view of the whole store whoa oh my god okay it says that you can send a an encouraging message to someone else in the mcdonald's crew dude dude that is incredible now as we played through this game we just kept making discovery after fascinating discovery is that ronald mcdonald's hand way too much to put in this video and side note if you're one of the people crazy enough to want to watch all 73 minutes of this playthrough you can just click the join button underneath this video and you'll get access to the entire thing as one of my channel members anyways it goes without saying that this was an immensely satisfying moment playing through this game for the first time and having a translator by my side to help out it felt like a victory it's a a great piece of history that we've we've uncovered here and i'm looking forward to um sharing it with the world yeah and thank you for uh doing your part for uh video game preservation man this'll be the first video material in the world that actually goes into properly what the game is like this has existed exclusively within the memories for like a decade yeah let's be honest though no one was going to document the mcdonald's video game yes game before you however about one week after i recorded my playthrough with samuel i was catching up with a friend over facetime and she asked me what i've been up to lately so walked her through this whole story the long-lost game the bloomberg video the auction the french guy codyton tweet who had a copy but couldn't get in because he didn't have the password et cetera et cetera and how i had just managed to get to it myself and she says to me so wait that password was it an employee id number or what so i go to cody's video to show her the exact password screen the guy was stuck on and i noticed something new while showing her cody's video i spotted something in the description that i hadn't seen before a new message that had been edited in since the last time i watched it in french in all capital letters idantifon2v and beneath that logins found with a youtube link i clicked the link and it took me to a live stream archive broadcast on youtube with 131 views 58 minutes long where cody enters a password and it actually works he gets in plays through the entire game just like me and samuel did and here's the really devastating part cody's playthrough had been streamed live to youtube on august 30th 2020. my playthrough with samuel that was on september 18th barely two weeks later we'd been beaten i gotta be honest with you here this was a little bit heartbreaking to have come this far and put in all this effort i was kicking myself if i just moved a little faster procrastinated a little less i could have been the actual first one to document this game at the same time though i was happy for cody and also mystified by the fact that he'd somehow gotten the password for his cartridge i mean we all know how i got the password for my version but how the hell did cody get his well strap in because cody's journey to get his cartridge's password is even crazier than my own over on that obscure gamers forum thread from the beginning of this video cody tells the full story in short he was able through a friend to meet in person with the i.t director of mcdonald's in his country presumably mcdonald's france upon seeing the mcdonald's ds this it guy freaked out said don't move and then brought it to the desk of none other than the ceo truly the scott president of domino's pizza of this particular story it turns out the ceo's wife is japanese and she herself had actually worked at mcdonald's japan corporate meaning she knew exactly who to contact about cody's problem weeks later cody found himself on an email chain with employees from mcdonald's europe mcdonald's uk mcdonald's australia and of course mcdonald's japan this email chain according to cody was loaded with information including scans of pdfs of the game's manual but unfortunately they weren't able to give him a password as the individual passwords were set by individual mcdonald's store management now a lot of people would have given up there but not cody he kept going and the actual explanation of what cody did next is pretty technical and honestly way above my head but at this point cody actually dove into the code itself he took apart the game's rom comparing the mcdonald's training cartridge's save data with other ds games and began to find similarities then incredibly cody made a huge discovery he stumbled across a string of code in the game that contained translations of the two character hex code for every single letter and number in the password screen from there he kept hunting and then found the entry in the code for crew members and at that point he had everything he needed the username le1038 and the password he needed zero zero zero zero zero zero he was in i could not stop smiling when i first read cody's story this guy had jumped through about a billion hoops and roadblocks to solve a very inconsequential mystery and to me that made me feel like he and i are kindred spirits in a way but also i'd be lying if i said i wasn't a little heartbroken that cody had ultimately beaten me to the punch but the irony wasn't lost on me either this entire time without either one of us knowing it cody and i had been racing in parallel neck and neck to the same finish line and unfortunately for me cody had beaten me fair and square by just a couple of days still i was determined to make this adventure worth it i had come too far to just throw all this away because someone else had beaten me to putting this on youtube and after thinking about it for a while i think i figured out what i can do see as of today the only two people we know for sure have access to this game are cody and myself and as cool as that scarcity is i think i want this game to be something that everybody can enjoy and cody's made it abundantly clear that he plans to never ever dump his copy after spending months on this project and reading tons and tons of forum threads about it one thing i feel pretty confident about is that people really want to see this game preserved both just to check the game out for themselves and also out of principle so one last time i reached out to samuel about my idea and samuel put me in touch with a game preservationist named scyther scyther walked me through the process of using some software called god mode 9 on my 3ds to dump the game cartridge itself in its entirety the game cartridge itself and crucially my save file since the game requires a password and after jumping through a few hoops we were successful so i'm happy to announce that if you or anyone else watching this video wants to play this long lost japanese mcdonald's training game for yourself i've created a page on archive.org where i've uploaded the rom and my save file and some basic instructions and you can download it and start playing with it today have fun it's only recently now that this whole thing is over that i've been able to reflect on just how bizarre and uniquely international this journey was the quest to get my hands on this game involved a german 3ds hacker a pseudonymous french rival a game archivist from the czech republic international smuggling and for the second time in my life the japanese arm of an american fast food company i still don't really understand why this keeps happening why i seem fated to pursue these trivial stories about companies like domino's japan or mcdonald's japan and though i don't know how things turned out this way there's one thing i know for sure i'm loving it stupid ending before we wrap up i have three really quick notes first and foremost i'd like to extend a huge thank you once again to bae for sponsoring this video and for helping preserve this weird little piece of internet history there's a link in the description of this video that gives you a free 2000 yen coupon to any new buy users who sign up it's a great service i've used it a ton of times so if you want to thank bae for making this video possible please consider clicking this link and checking the site out also in the time since the story began by has opened up international shipping via dhl so getting stuff in out of japan is now a breeze also a huge shout out to jennifer walton who composed that phenomenal reorchestrated version of the mcdonald's training game menu theme that you heard at the very end of this video i couldn't have done it without her i'm i still laugh every time i listen to that song it's so perfect uh here's a link to that if you want to hear it secondly the link to download the mcdonald's ds game rom that i dumped is linked in the description below so please check that out and lastly you might have noticed that right next to the subscribe button i now have a join button under my videos basically if you'd like to support me making more videos like this one you can do so for just five bucks a month and get access to all sorts of free extras like me and samuel's full hour-long playthrough of mcdonald's ds game commentary tracks for my older videos and so much more thanks for watching and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Nick Robinson

Views: 950,121

Rating: 4.9592781 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: -e6xOBCAVvA

Length: 49min 2sec (2942 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Istartedthewar]

That's awesome.

Screw that guy who refused to dump it because it's 'illegal'. Like fucking McDonald's Japan would go after anyone for uploading an obsolete piece of training software for the DS. He obviously just wanted to be the only one who could ever experience it.

[u/Reasonable-Red-Panda]

When I watched Mark put it his baggage claim bag, on the edge of the suitcase, I already knew the two possibilities of what was going to happen. I can't say this didn't fill me with a sort of visceral rage.

[u/AxelPizza]

Does anyone know of a DS game that was a museum tour of the Louvre. I remember it from when I was a kid, they sold a DS cartridge with a tour of the museum. Has that been preserved? I would like to see it again

[u/Shonumi]

This is awesome news! I saw this pop up on Yahoo Auctions Japan some months ago and was very tempted to buy it and dump the cart. Ultimately decided not to (spent most of that money somewhere else) but I'm certainly glad someone else stepped up for the right reasons!

[u/Syckobot]

The reporter at the start of the video that didn't know what a Nintendo DS is hurt my soul. To be that out of touch to not even know it's a nintendo product is sad.

[u/tacticalcraptical]

This is great news, I can now get back to sleeping soundly at night!

​

Joking aside, I do applaud the guys and gals who hunt these crazy roms down and this is a fascinating story.

[u/washedsouls]

My man Nick is a hero, sure he was beaten to streaming the game online, but he decided not to be a fuckwit and dumped the rom like any decent person would.

[u/Voltrondemort]

Did they need the password? I mean, if you could dump the rom couldn't you brute-force it?

[u/CreativeNameIKnow]

How is no one talking about this!?