Food Video Games: A History: Food + Cooking : gourmet.com

Pac-Man (1980, Arcade)

At the dawn of the age of video games, in neon-lit caverns known as arcades, a competition for quarters raged between games about shooting (Asteroids, Space Invaders) and games about eating (Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man). For a while, it seemed that eating had the upper hand. Everything about Pac-Man appealed to the lusty urges of hunger: The design of the character itself, pie-eyed and yellow as a lemon tart, was inspired by a partially eaten pizza. Fittingly, Pac-Man machines came to occupy the dingy corners of pizzerias all over America. Hungry players gorged on pellets, ghosts, and fruit (and the machines gobbled up quarters) while their pizzas were prepared. Even today, Pac-Man’s waka-waka munching sound can trigger sudden pepperoni cravings in certain individuals.

Image Courtesy of Gamespot.com

Burgertime (1982, Arcade)

If Pac-Man’s never-ending buffet encouraged binge pizza eating, Burgertime was the food nightmare that followed. The player is a chef who builds giant hamburgers by running over their constituent ingredients (buns, meat patties, lettuce). And while tread-upon meat isn’t very appetizing, the chef’s freakish pursuers are what lend the game its fever-dream quality. Anthropomorphic sausages, fried eggs with legs, and murderous pickle slices dog our poor chef tirelessly around the screen. Luckily, a dash of pepper stuns the evil ingredients just long enough to let you drop the super-sized burger constituents on them. If you don’t believe that this game was creepy, just check out the TV commercial.

Tapper (1983, Arcade)

With hunger covered, game designers turned their efforts to thirst, creating Tapper, the only beer-sponsored game ever to make it into the arcades. Budweiser’s logo features prominently on the back wall of each of Tapper’s bars, where the player, as a bartender straight out of a Prohibition-era speakeasy, serves cold ones to lines of demanding patrons. It’s not all selfless service of your fellow man, though. At the end of each round, the bartender always gulps down a cold one in celebration. The fact that the game’s last level is a bar on an alien spaceship is probably a reflection of his level of inebriation. Tapper was later retrofitted with soda and renamed Root Beer Tapper in response to concerns about advertising alcohol to children. Luckily, they didn’t get rid of the dancing burlesque girls.

PO’ed (1995, Sony PlayStation)

In the ’90s, the gaming industry fell in love with guns. The old food-themed games looked like quaint antiques in the face of gory 3-D space shooters like Doom. In a stroke of genius, PO’ed combined contemporary alien-blasting with a concept that could compete with even the strangest drug-fueled ’80s arcade game: As a chef aboard a star cruiser, your mission was supposed to be to feed a crowd of rough-neck space explorers, but an alien attack killed everyone else on board. Now, using an endless supply of throw-able chef’s knives and a trusty iron skillet, it’s up to the cook to rid the spaceship of invaders. Later levels allowed the chef to travel by jetpack, an innovation that kitchen-gadget manufacturers have yet to make reality.

Last Call (2000, PC)

The first food game with any practical value, Last Call was as much a bartending tutorial as it was interactive entertainment. You play the role of mixologist at a local watering hole, and Last Call demands only that you do what any good bartender would do—make decent drinks while flirting with patrons and raking in the dough. Being good at the game means memorizing drink recipes, from old standby tonics and martinis to more complicated tiki bar concoctions, making Last Call an entertaining way to bone up on cocktail basics. And if you accidentally curdle the milk in a customer’s drink, they let you know by splashing their lunch across the bar.

Image Courtesy of Gamespot.com

Diner Dash (2003, PC)

When Americans collectively gave up on work at the turn of the millennium and decided instead to fill their daytime hours with web videos and social networking, a new breed of games was born. Ignoring the science-fiction fantasies of teenage boys, these games sought to appeal to a broad swath of people. Apparently, the average cubicle worker fantasizes about running his or her own little diner. Diner Dash is happy to oblige. Ironically, this lunch-hour distraction is all about time management, seating customers, taking their orders, and bringing out their chow as efficiently as possible. With versions of the game available for practically every gadget that has a screen and several sequels continuing the craze, Diner Dash almost singlehandedly brought back food games from the edge of extinction.

Image Courtesy of Dig Communications

Cooking Mama (2006, Nintendo DS)

All of these games dealt with food and drink in one way or another, but none attempted to put cooking front and center. Cooking Mama was the first game to effectively convey the tactile joys of cooking—chopping, sautéing, stirring, and peeling—using the newfangled touch screen on the Nintendo DS. It doesn’t get much simpler: Players select from a menu of dishes to prepare, from Western standards like spaghetti bolognese and fried chicken to tempura and tofu sushi, then race through a list of steps, slicing across the screen to chop vegetables and flicking at panhandles to sauté. Cooking Mama later made its way to the Nintendo Wii, where full motion control made the grunt work even more physical—not exactly a relaxing way to wind down after racing to get dinner on the table for your family.

Image Courtesy of Majesco Entertainment

Order Up! (2008, Nintendo Wii)

As far as cooking games go, Order Up! is the total package. Not only do you get to cook from a huge menu of dishes using the Wii’s motion-sensitive controller (which acts at various times like a knife, a spatula, and a panhandle), but you also get to run your own restaurant, climbing up the career ladder from short-order cook at a crummy diner to celebrity chef at a high-end hot spot. Order Up!, like cooking in a real kitchen, is all about juggling several tasks at once and getting everything to the table while it’s still hot. So you might have fries in the fryer and burgers on the grill while you’re chopping onions and tomatoes. Later on in the game, you can hire line cooks to take on more responsibilities, increasing your capacity to turn out food—along with the probability that you’ll set the whole kitchen on fire when you forget about something on the stove.

Image Courtesy of HighWater Group

Personal Trainer: Cooking (November 2008, Nintendo DS)

Due out later this year, Personal Trainer: Cooking is less a game than an electronic cookbook. While it probably won’t replace your tattered collection, this handy program does many things a cookbook can’t: It reads recipes to you while you cook (a simple voice command of “continue” moves the instructions along, saving your DS from messy hands). It includes video demos for cooking techniques that have never been easy to explain on the page, like cleaning and filleting fish. And its database of recipes (more than 200, according to Nintendo) is searchable by ingredient, region, and calorie count. The best thing about the “game,” though, is that it lets you change the number of servings on the fly, updating the ingredient measurements automatically. Who hasn’t screwed that one up?

Images Courtesy of Nintendo

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