Sneak King
- Brand
- Burger King
- Year
- 2006
- Objective
- Sales
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- In-Game
- agency
- CP+B
- production
- Blitz Games
- Added
- October 2026
- 1
The player buys the disc at a Burger King restaurant and plays it on either Xbox or Xbox 360; on starting up, the player takes control of The King, a mascot in an oversized head mask, and chooses between a free-play mode or a set of structured challenges.
- 2
In free-play, the player walks the level unseen and unheard, using a mini-map that marks available challenges and nearby pedestrians to scout the area before taking on a task.
- 3
The player picks a challenge from a map (Saw Mill, Cul-De-Sac, Construction Zone, or Downtown), each with its own win condition such as reaching a score threshold or delivering food within a time limit.
- 4
The core loop is stealth-based: the player spots hungry pedestrians by their thought bubbles and rising hunger meter, then closes in while staying out of their narrow cone of vision and keeping a noise meter low by slowing from a run to a walk.
- 5
The player can duck into hiding spots, such as a crate near a delivery truck, and wait to ambush a target as it passes.
- 6
Reaching a target undetected triggers a food-serving animation, during which the player times a button press against a filling Flourish meter to score style points and a score multiplier.
- 7
Points are awarded based on the target's hunger level, how stealthily and closely the player approached, and the flourish of the delivery; this total is checked against the challenge's target score, and being spotted can drop the target's hunger or fail the attempt, forcing a retry.
- 8
Clearing half of a location's 20 challenges unlocks the next location, and progressing through all 80 challenges across the four maps unlocks an alternate costume for The King, with the Xbox 360 version also awarding Gamerscore for specific goals and stylish deliveries.
Objective
Burger King wanted to move its King mascot off TV and into a real gaming format without sinking to logo-slapped flash games, giving the brand a reason — and a product — for holiday traffic in late 2006. Microsoft, in turn, got a branded presence in 7,200 restaurants over the holidays and a new audience for the Xbox 360.
Solution
The King sneaks through four settings — a sawmill, a cul-de-sac, a construction site, downtown — hunting for hungry passersby to feed. The player creeps up from behind cover, times the approach so no one turns around, then hands over one of four Burger King items with a quick serving animation; get spotted and the target bolts, ending the attempt. Free Roam lets players wander a level looking for targets at their own pace, while Challenge mode drops them straight into one of 20 timed feeding tasks per level with a score to beat. A session ends when the level's challenges are cleared or the player quits back to the menu.
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
Sneak King can't be played today through any official digital channel: it was never released digitally, only sold on a physical disc bundled for both Xbox and Xbox 360 at Burger King restaurants with a value meal, so the sole way to run it now is that original disc on period hardware. It isn't in Microsoft's backward-compatibility lineup for newer consoles. Its Burger King value-meal promotion ran from November 19 to December 24, 2006.
