As well as the television adverts, there were also Search for the Rowntree computer games. They were free to play and you just had to go to rowntrees.co.uk to play them.

Photo of one of the games

The games don't seem to exist anymore, but thanks to Katrina Bowen at The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, we do have a photo of one of them:

Okay, so the image quality could be better and there is a little girl's head blocking the view, but beggars can't be choosers, as this image is currently the only one we have of the game.

Katrina says:

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. [...] Little did we know this would one day become the only remaining image of a particular online video game. Of all the games I could have been playing in that moment, it was this one.

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.

It was one of the first isometric games I played and I didn't like how the up/down/left/right arrow keys had to correspond with diagonal directions.

I actually forgot what the game was like. I thought it was some kind of point and click game like the Bionicle flash games, where you have to collect items and solve puzzles. It’s a surprise that's it’s actually an isometric. I reckon there will probably actually several games and this is just one of them.

Katrina has also written an article about the game at http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/59044/search-for-the-rowntree-(lost-video-game)/.

Other people's memories

Some bloke says:

im sure there were a few minigames and one was a mean bean machine type game

Tweeting the game's creators

In June 2019, I tracked down two of the game's creators, Paul Lemon (@anthonylime on Twitter) and Anthony Briggs (@quiffboy), and tweeted them. Paul replied:

Mmm, from what I remember the games where tightly linked to the back end databases (to save scores etc) so I’m not sure how playabale they’d be without that infrastructure, even if @anthonylime had the Flash assets

— Barry Briggs (still staying home) (@quiffboy) July 30, 2019