Search for the Rowntree (Lost Video Game)

Or, My Search for the Rowntree's Fruit Pastilles Game.

It was December 2001 and my dad had just got our first digital camera, a Kodak DC3400. He took a photo of me playing a game on our Windows 98 PC. The photograph is like a time capsule in itself, but little did we know this would one day become the only remaining image of a particular online video game.

I regularly visited the Rowntree's website to play this Fruit Pastilles game and, for a time, it was probably my favourite game. It played in a pop-out window, and I believe it was Shockwave-based, like a lot of online games I played at that time. Though my memory of it is no longer perfect, I know it was an isometric game set in a forest. Perhaps predictably, you collected Fruit Pastilles, which acted as keys that opened doors or gates of corresponding colour, unlocking the next part of the game. I don't even have the actual title for the game.

The screenshot above is Rowntrees.co.uk as of November 2001, just a month before my photo, thanks to the Wayback Machine. There was perhaps more than one game on the website, but this is the only one I can remember playing. The site stayed the same until mid-2004, so the game had a good run.

While trying to find some trace of the game on the Internet I discovered a brilliant website - SearchForTheRowntree.com, where some extensive work has been done on properly documenting the information about campaign. There's much more to the Search for the Rowntree than just a forgotten online game.

Interestingly, the storyline from the TV ads was never concluded. Of eight planned adverts, only four were released (allegedly due to a shift in the Rowntree's marketing team). What I remember is just a tiny element of the full campaign.

Did you play this too? Or perhaps you were on the team behind the game? Please get in touch if you can provide any additional information.

Sadly, single screenshots and anecdotes are already all that remain of some games. Here at the Centre we work hard on video game preservation, imaging and storing physical software. Thanks to community-led projects such as Flashpoint, there will hopefully be fewer online games lost to time - which will become of even greater importance when Adobe revoke Flash support at the end of 2020.

Please click here for more information on our preservation work: Videogame Preservation

Thanks to Paul Jones of SearchForTheRowntree.com, without whom I would not have had enough information to even publish a page about this game.

Katrina Bowen, Design & Communications Officer