No, you're not reading that headline incorrectly – fast food giant McDonald's has just released a Game Boy Color game in the Year of Our Lord, 2023.
Developed by Krool Toys, Grimace's Birthday launched yesterday via its own website. You can play the game in your browser, but the game itself was built to function on Nintendo's 1998 handheld – and the ROM image has been dumped online, so you can do just that.
The game is a platformer which sees the return of McDonaldland characters Grimace, Birdie the Early Bird, Hamburgular and the McNugget Buddies, all to mark the arrival of the 'Grimace's Birthday ice cream shake' product served at U.S. McDonald's restaurants.
The game is the work of GumpyFunction (Tom Lockwood) and Pearacidic (Bryan Taylor), both of whom have worked on 'modern' Game Boy games in the past. You can read about how it was made here.
You can download the ROM file from here.
McDonald’s and video games have a pretty long relationship. Japanese studio Treasure created McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure for the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis in the '90s, while Virgin Interactive released Global Gladiators with Golden Arches branding. More recently, McDonald's in China gave away a Chicken Nugget Tetris handheld.