Gaming scholars are incredibly adept at swiftly pointing out what’s missing from a particular game or series of games. For some, the root of a title’s evil lies in clumsy and half-baked AI, while others find the lack of a solid narrative disturbing. There is, however, an upstart group of game wizards that believe they have found the missing component that could save our pubescent hobby: hamburgers! That’s right, with little exception, games show a profound ignorance of the importance of the choice of daily nourishment such as fries, soda, and chocolate chip cookies.

The heart of this concept actually runs much deeper than that, though. Gamers need boundaries that the simple injection of snack-themed levels or hash brown enemies can’t provide. They need mascots, memorably named value meals, and objectives designed to mirror the feeling of purchasing and eating name-brand foodstuffs. These ideas have been developed and implemented with increased fervor over the years, but it’s important to tend to the roots before judging their growth

 Synchronize Your Watches …

… because it’s BurgerTime! Flash back to Japan, 1982. Sauntering out of a late-night showing of Space Adventure Cobra, you find yourself surrounded by arcade machines, all of them pulsating and gyrating like something out of an old animated cautionary tale. In particular, one cabinet works the floor like it’s getting paid by the hour. You slip some money down its steel-clad panties and boot up the most tasty experience of your life: BurgerTime, or, as this sexy Data East title was originally known in Japan, Hamburger.

Herein lies a sort of genesis for food-based gaming. While it had its occasional predecessors, none were as visually acute at portraying man’s hunger, man’s desire to lord over his prey via swift evasion coupled with the creation of giant sandwich meats. But something was lacking from this experience- something kept it from being a completely relevant milestone.

That something is brand name recognition! However fun it may have been to climb ladders, a nickel’s length from the grimy grip of “Mr. Pickle,” it would have reached far greater heights as Wendy’s BurgerTime or Fatburger presents … Hamburger. Game cassette developers would eventually learn their lesson, but not after years of implacable regret.

Ninja Product Placement

How could publishers and developers team together with popular food outlets for the ultimate game experience-one that entertains, informs, and dangles a digital carrot of hunger before the player? Well, small-screen commercialized adventures came and went, but the radioactive power of the 90s added the dash of ingenuity that this fledgling subgenre so desperately needed.

On March 16, 1990, Capcom released an action platformer called Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru (“Masked Ninja Hanamaru“). Knowing full well that Americans hate ninja action but love pizza, the overall look of the game was localized in the US as Yo! Noid. The titular ninja was slickly swapped with Domino Pizza’s wily mascot, the Noid, and harrowing stage-end duels were replaced with turn-based pizza-eating contests. The world shouted with a cheese-dripping grin, “hooray,” and a legend was born!

That thieving and malevolent, yet curiously endearing, bastard of a mascot would become the Pied Piper of food chain television games, leading in stray rats from related venues, including but not limited to fast food’s fizz-crowned fiancée, the soft drink!

Cool Spots and Buried Treasure

The years 1993-1994 saw yet another explosion in “hot eats and cool treats•bCrLf invading the videogame world. Most notable were the platformers Cool Spot and McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure. If neither of these titillating titles gives you goosebumps, then it might be time to go out, get a juicy Big Mac, and think deeply about the direction your life is headed!

Cool Spot was developed and published by Virgin Interactive, which saw fit to assault pretty much every console on the market, from the Genesis to Game Boy; Cool Spot couldn’t be stopped. Yet another mascot lost to time, 7up’s enigmatic red dot did the expected platformer dance, jumping around sandy beaches and shooting (un)cola bubbles at his enemies without ever losing the cool edge his shades provided. In fact, Spot was so “cool•bCrLf that he warranted a sequel a couple years later, Spot Goes to Hollywood. Jealous?

But who cares about the adventures of noncaffeinated beverages when you can save up your coins and nab a sweet side-scrolling dip into Ronald McDonald’s very own Treasure Land? The title isn’t only appropriate in reference to the bountiful booty coveted by Grimace and co., but the game just so happens to be the creation of legendary Japanese developer, Treasure (Gunstar Heroes, Bangai-oh). What a treat to finally see the Hamburglar rendered in glorious 2-D sprites! It’s one of those things that you don’t know you want until it’s sitting there in your hands.

By Royal Decree

Food and drink games had obviously blossomed from the awkward and unofficial (BurgerTime and Root Beer Tapper) to the elegant tie-ins we know and love today. Still, something was missing. Where was the diversity!? Japan at least had the Pepsiman running game-which was kind of like a 3-D version of that old Back to the Future game on NES-but snack games in America were dominated almost exclusively by platformers stuck in the second dimension! It didn’t help that, as games grow up, people are less willing to indulge being advertised to their digital walls.

What the ever-hungry world needed was some sort of game that you could actually buy with a hamburger! Who would be bold enough to answer such a call? Why, his royal majesty The Burger King, of course! In November 2006, BK unleashed their oh so elegant mascot into the wild in three cheap and quickly digestible Xbox/Xbox 360 games: Big Bumpin’, Pocketbike Racer (inexplicably co-starring TV’s Brooke Burke), and the unabashedly creepy stealth game, Sneak King.

Rather than throwing the “Noid•bCrLf at you for 50 clams, this corny threesome only insisted you fork over a few bucks alongside your Double Whopper and fries. For ages, man attempted to somehow physically cram hamburgers into games, something that, thanks to the future, is no longer some utopian fantasy! The games themselves are about as delicious as you’d expect them to be, with Sneak King leading the pack to the extent that you can get excited about assuming the identity of the Burger King, hiding in a trash can, ambushing and feeding hungry suburbanites. The important thing about these games, far beyond whether or not they tickle you just right, is that their swift sales pave the way for every other fast food joint to follow suit!

The Crystal Ball and Its Accompanying “Happy Meal•bCrLf

Look how far we’ve come, folks. Burgers to burgers, dust to dust, this long-running game type is far from deceased. Let’s take this time to go all “me hungry•bCrLf Nostradamus on the food industry. Who will be the next chain to continue down BK’s path? (The record skips again in repetition) “Why, Burger King, of course!•bCrLf Only a fool would be reluctant to follow up on a millions-selling success; the Gears of War of snack sims, if you will. Expect McDonald’s to follow suit eventually, triggering the tastiest domino effect in the land and, ultimately, ending tragically in a collection of seizure-inducing mini-games developed by a tech college for distribution with Popeye’s buttermilk biscuits.