PocketBike Racer
- Brand
- Burger King
- Year
- 2006
- Objective
- Sales
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Racing & Sports
- Platform
- In-Game
- agency
- CP+B
- production
- Blitz Games
- Added
- October 2026
- 1
A player buys a Burger King value meal between November 19 and December 24, 2006 (North America only) and pays an extra $3.99 for a disc not sold in stores; the disc holds separate Xbox and Xbox 360 builds and boots the matching version automatically.
- 2
From the main menu, the player picks single-player career tournaments, Time Trial, four-player split-screen, or an Xbox Live match, then chooses a tournament type — Standard Race, Battle Royale, Ultimate Cone Trial, or Hard Core Racing — and an engine class of 50cc, 100cc, or 150cc.
- 3
The player picks one of about eight characters, including The King, Subservient Chicken, Whopper Jr., Brooke Burke, Burger King employees, and a couple of ordinary riders, then selects a bike from a roster of eight; only two bikes are available at the start, with the rest unlocked by winning tournaments, and each bike differs in handling, top speed, and acceleration.
- 4
Races run on five branded tracks — a Burger King parking lot, a construction site, a residential neighborhood, the King's garden, and Fantasy Ranch with streets made of cheese — short courses with hairpin turns, straights, and jumps, built on cartoonish, floaty physics where bikes turn slowly and never tip over.
- 5
Instead of item boxes, the player rides through gates placed on the track that fill a shared gauge; passing through a gate also disables it briefly for opponents.
- 6
Spending the gauge yields a small turbo boost at low charge or a weapon at high charge, with stronger effects the fuller the gauge; the weapon set includes rockets, homing projectiles, lightning, firecrackers, and a control-reversal attack, though rockets are the only consistently useful one.
- 7
The tournament mode changes the objective: Battle Royale shifts focus from racing to hitting opponents with gadgets, starting players with shields before generator pickups grant real weapons; Ultimate Cone Trial has racers compete to be first through 20 lit cones on the track; Hard Core Racing strips out gates and weapons for a pure race on cornering skill.
- 8
Winning tournaments unlocks new bikes and awards achievements, with separate achievements for stringing tournament wins together, posting sub-1:30 lap times in Time Trial on every track, and winning a race with every Burger King mascot character.
- 9
Up to four players share one console in split-screen across the same modes, or up to eight play online via Xbox Live, with an achievement for 25 online matches, though critics reported online sessions frequently dropping or crashing.
- 10
Races are scored to a soundtrack featuring Miami band The Dead Hookers' Bridge Club, matching the game's Burger King ad-campaign setting.
Objective
Burger King wanted to hold a customer's attention for hours, not thirty seconds, and drive holiday-season traffic into restaurants. The idea grew out of talks with Xbox's marketing team, who agreed to put a branded game on the console only if it was a real game built around the brand, not a disguised ad.
Solution
Players pick a racer from a roster of Burger King characters and staff — The King, Subservient Chicken, Whopper Jr., Brooke Burke — and choose one of eight pocketbikes, with two available at the start and six more unlocked by winning tournaments. Races run on five brand-themed tracks, including a Burger King parking lot and the King's own garden, under four rule sets (Standard Race, Battle Royale, Ultimate Cone Trial, Hard Core Racing) across three engine classes. Instead of picking up items on the track, players build a meter by driving through gates; the fuller it gets, the stronger the turbo boost or weapon they can unleash, from homing rockets to an attack that flips a rival's steering for a few seconds. A session can be a single Time Trial lap, a four-player split-screen race, or an eight-player match over Xbox Live.
Burger King only ever reported sales for the three games together, never per title. It counted more than 2 million copies in the first four weeks (December 2006), twice the 1 million mark at which a game usually counts as a blockbuster; a 2007 Ad Age report cited by EGM put sales at 2.5 million in the first five weeks, with the three games, taken together, among the top 10 best-selling games of 2006. Burger King's results for the quarter to 31 December 2006 put sales at more than 3.2 million copies and called the collection the best-selling video game of the holiday season; CP+B's own count in January 2007 was more than 2.7 million. In the same release, net income rose 41% to $38 million and revenue 9% to $559 million, with the Value Menu and the Xbox games credited for higher sales and traffic.
Can you still play it?
Sources
You can't play PocketBike Racer today through any official store or re-release: it was never sold digitally, and it's absent from Xbox's official backward-compatibility list for Xbox One/Series. The only way to play it now is on original Xbox or Xbox 360 hardware with a physical disc, which was never resold separately but can turn up secondhand on marketplaces like eBay. The Burger King value-meal promotion that distributed the disc ran November 19 to December 24, 2006, with leftover copies cleared out at $0.99 in February 2007.
