Millsberry
General Mills' cereal-box virtual town: make a character, earn Millsbucks, furnish a house, and play arcade games named for Reese's Puffs and Lucky Charms. Millsberry ran from 2004 to 2010, the fullest advergame of its era, and signed off by handing every citizen a yearbook.
Millsberry.com appeared in 2004 (the Internet Archive's first capture is from September of that year), a browser-based town where kids created a character and moved into a world built entirely out of General Mills cereals. You could wander through Buzz Bee's Greenhouse, tour the Cookie Crisp Factory, and shop at the Trix Toys & Games store; the arcade ran games like Reese's Puffs Cereal Snowboard Slalom and Lucky Charms Charmed Life; and your character could pursue virtual careers from fashion designer to race-car driver. Millsbucks, the town's currency, paid for a house, its furnishings, and groceries, cereal included.
It was marketing, and it arrived just as marketing like it came under scrutiny. In mid-2006 the Kaiser Family Foundation released "It's Child's Play: Advergaming and the Online Marketing of Food to Children," the first comprehensive study of how food companies advertised to kids online, and found advergames on 73 percent of the food websites it reviewed. Millsberry was the fullest version of the idea: not a game on a cereal site but a cereal company's whole town, where the brands were the scenery.
The site closed in 2010. When Millsberry closed, General Mills gave its players a send-off instead of a dead link: every citizen could download a commemorative yearbook filled with screenshots. The company still lists the town among the milestones of its own cereal history.
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