Imagine if this happened: at a British gaming conference, the director of McDonald’s nascent video game division divulges that their first project for the chain was to program a fast food empire simulator to help train management. However, during beta testing of the game, McDonald’s green-friendly game programmers become more and more disturbed as McDonald’s managers time and time again trigger global armageddon within the game. Consequently, McDonald’s Interactive publicly calls its parent corporation a bunch of blood thirsty baby murderers and severs their umbilical cord with their righteously gnashing teeth.

That would be pretty awesome, wouldn’t it? We’d be all over such a story. If it happened. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Worse yet, Consumerist sister site Kotaku got punked by the probable hoax.

There were a lot of reasons to suspect this is totally bogus. For one thing, it’s too good to be true: it reads like a transcription of the sort of green politick ejaculatory fantasy that feverishly flickers across the inner eyelids of the average McDonald’s detractor as he folds the spine of Fast Food Nation around his taut erection.

Furthermore, Google searches for “McDonald’s Interactive” come up blank for any mention of an internal games division. Likewise Andrew Shimmery-Wolf, the McDonald’s Interactive manager who supposedly delivered the bird.

Now download the Powerpoint Presentation from the site. Notice anything? The slides that correspond to ones shown in the photographs are pixelated image grabs.

Finally, the domain mcdonaldsinteractive.com was only registered two months ago. And hey, guess who registered it? Our old friends behind the Anti-McDonald’s Advergame. Woo!

Kotaku, Kotaku. How embarrassing for you! This is why every Gawker site should have a Consumerist on staff. Are you guys hiring?

McDonald’s Interactive Grows Up And Leaves Home [Kotaku]
Related: Anti-McDonalds Advergame Misses Mark

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