Sometime in 2001 Sony teamed up with McDonalds for a unique promotion, the McDonald’s Original Happy Disc. The PlayStation 2 game contains demos of PaRappa the Rapper 2 and Piposaru 2001 processed with additional hamburgers. Piposaru 2001 probably needs some explanation since it was never released outside of Japan. The title is an entry in the Ape Escape series, but you don’t catch monkeys. Jimmy (aka Hikaru) doesn’t have to catch the monkeys. After saving the world from a simian invasion he is reduced to washing their pants.
Piposaru 2001 is a simple title to grasp. You run around with a vacuum cleaner and use it to suck the pants off a monkey. Once you grab a monkey’s drawers it becomes embarrassed and more importantly hostile towards Hikaru. If he gets hit he can eat tasty McDonald’s snacks like burgers and fries to recover his life. I suppose the floating McDonalds blimp is responsible for dropping these on the midair stages.
Once you have a trail of pants following behind Hikaru you can run to a giant washer machine and throw them inside. The levels are timed and after you only have a few minutes to achieve the goal. To further complicate matters the Happy Meal disc has a set time limit that restarts the game after a couple minutes of playtime.
This hilarious loading screen is shown when loading stages in the first (only?) Sony/McDonald’s advergame.
