[Update]: After quite a while, Chex Quest HD has now been release for free!

Chex Quest is a total conversion mod for Doom that was designed with a simple idea behind it, to sell a whole bunch of cereal. Much to everyone's surprise, it ended up being a pretty damn good conversion, so much so that I remember getting my hands on it during my younger years... and Chex isn't even a brand out here!

It doesn't stop there, however, as Chex Quest was apparently so popular it ended up spawning a sequel shortly afterwards, and even a third installment some 10 years after the original at the behest of numerous fans. Now, with its 20th anniversary fast approaching, it appears that Chex Quest is about to receive an HD remake in Unreal Engine 4.

This little announcement comes from a fascinating interview Zam did with Charles Jacobi, the artist behind Chex Quest, so if you're interested in all of the details on how the mod came to be and what exactly the team had to work with, I fully recommend you give it a read. For now, however, here's what Jacobi had to say about the HD remaster and why he's even working on it:

"And I was just pretty amazed... 10 years later there was still a fan site for the game that had active users and then that they went crazy over just getting a bunch of new sprites. And so that just kind of, I don't know, got me excited about the universe again. And so over the next year and a half, just kind of in my free time when I could, I started building more sprites and built five more levels and got a little help to get everything moved over into a modern source port, into zDoom, because the old game often doesn't even run on modern Windows. And yeah, so, that was a lot of fun and it was pretty well received.

I don't know if you've been paying any attention, but I recently announced -- because it all started happening again with this year being the 20th anniversary -- so they're all like, you know, 'Are you going to make another, Chex Quest 4 or whatever?' I'm like, 'Well, I'm definitely not interested in that.'

 But I've always kind of wondered about like 'Well, what would it be like if I just did a remake of the first one, but with a modern game engine?' And at my professional job, I use the new Unreal, Unreal 4, and I love it. It's a really powerful tool set, especially for content people...I don't necessarily need to be a programmer and I can build lots of functionality with it. So I've started building, basically, a high-def remake of the first one. 

Interviewer: That's awesome! I did not know that. So that's something you are working on now?

Yeah, and again, just like Chex Quest 3 it's really just a hobby thing that I do on the side. So, you know, progress is slow. I think I've got maybe half the monsters made, half the weapons made, and maybe two levels."

The more I think about it the more ridiculous this situation ends up being, but I still have to admit that I'm genuinely excited for an HD remake of a game based on a cereal I've never even seen, let alone eaten. Whether its going to live up to my childhood memories, I have no idea, but its certainly going to be a unique game once its finally finished.

Naturally, there is no release date currently set, but Jacobi did mention he wanted to get it done before its 20th anniversary, so expect Chex Quest HD to arrive at some point this year.