Digital Café

Digital Café was a new media company founded in early 1991 by Dean Hyers (creative director) and Mike Koenigs (technical director, foley, web development). It operated for 7 years independently in St. Paul before being acquired in October 1998 as a new Minneapolis-based division of Campbell Mithun Esty (an advertising firm) specializing in programming and design for special-market advertising (promotional games, site design, etc.) similar to Black Widow Games. In 1995, Hyers and Koenigs formed a sister company to Digital Café called Digital Entertainment as a joint venture with Navarre Corporation. Digital Entertainment was then sold to Navarre Corporation in 1996.

In 1999, Digital Café merged with four other similar firms to become Zentropy Partners.

In 2008, Mike Koenigs bought the name and trademarks back and restarted Digital Cafe as a digital advertising agency, opening a small studio in San Diego. His company specializes in online video advertising and has high-definition cameras, green screen backgrounds, and various digital editing equipment at their disposal.

During its lifespan Digital Café is best known for developing the Chex Quest series of computer games which have attracted a sizeable cult following. The first game in the series, Chex Quest (or Chex Quest 1), employed the Doom engine as a base and is considered a total conversion. It was released in boxes of General Mills Chex cereal as a free promotional in 1996. According to General Mills this was the first time that a computer game had been included with cereal in this manner. The promotion was quite successful (increasing Chex Cereal sales by 248%) and this practice has since been duplicated several times by other cereal manufacturers. Digital Café released Chex Quest 2 the following year as a free download from their website. Using the same executable files as used to run the original game, Chex Quest 2 could be classified as an add-on mod since it requires the original Chex Quest to run. In 1998, promotional material for Chex Quest 3 was put on the Digital Café website, and plans were drafted to allow updates to the game to be posted on the company Web site as an effective way of generating traffic there. In September 2008, 9 years after Digital Café ceased to exist, Chex Quest 3 was developed and released as a service to fans by former Digital Café members, Charles Jacobi (art director and lead artist) and Scott Holman (programmer).

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