The California Raisins

The California Raisins is a wonderfully strange DOS game based on the famous claymation fruit characters who somehow became pop-culture celebrities in the 1980s. Released in 1988, it turns the singing raisins into the stars of an arcade-style adventure filled with colorful characters and appropriately fruity nonsense. The idea of transforming advertising mascots into videogame heroes already feels wonderfully bizarre today, but the late 1980s had little interest in asking whether something was a sensible videogame subject. The result is a charming curiosity from an era when a successful commercial character could apparently be given a computer game simply because someone had a spare development budget and an enthusiastic marketing department.