BurgerTime
Year Of Release: 1982
Studio: Data East
Description
Released in 1982 by Data East, well actually while it was Data East who made the game, in the USA it would actually be Midway who would publish the game to the arcades. BurgerTime is seen as one of the classics of early 80’s gaming and is still a very popular game in the competitive gaming scene today. The game was originally going to be called the very generic sounding, Hamburger, but shortly before it was released the name was changed to BurgerTime.
Like many popular arcade games of the early 80's BurgerTime is a game that makes use of just a single screen for each level. The story of the game is that you play the role of Peter Pepper and you want to make the world’s greatest burgers, there are all these “evil” foods who want to stop you from doing this. Truth be told, BurgerTime like many other early 80’s arcade was not popular because of its story it was the fun and addictive game play that kept people playing. And it was the fun and intriguing art work on the marquee and the side of the arcade cabinet that would bring people over to the machine in the first place.
Each screen of BurgerTime has a burger bun top and a burger bun bottom at the top and bottom of the screen. In between the two are numerous parts of a burger, meat patties, lettuce and tomatoes. You control Peter Pepper and need to have him walk along the full length of an ingredient to make it drop down. You do this until the burger has been made and once all the burgers have been made and fall to the plates at the bottom of the screen the level is done. To make things tougher though you need to avoid or kill Mr Egg, Mr Pickle and Mr Hot Dog.
The way that you kill the enemies depends on how high of a score you are going to get. One way you can kill them is to drop a burger ingredient onto them. Once they are killed they disappear, but they do re spawn a short while later. The other and way to score more points by taking care of an enemy is to make them drop. To do this you need to lure them behind you and have them follow you onto one of the ingredients as you cross it. It will drop taking them with you, give you a higher score and your ingredient will drop an extra place.
Current High Score: 11,512,500 by Bryan L Wagner
Related Titles
BurgerTime was insanely popular and as a result many of the consoles and the home computers of the era would get a port of the game. Atari 2600, ColecoVision and even the NES would get versions of BurgerTime released for them. The Nintendo Game Boy would get a special version of the game which was called BurgerTime Deluxe.
There was a spin off game released called Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory, but this game would not reach the same heights that BurgerTime did. A true sequel called Super BurgerTime would be released which let you play as Peter Pepper Jr and featured many improved elements such as vastly improved graphics, new game play ideas and a two player option. Another game in the series called PizzaTime was scheduled for release sometime in 1983-84, but due to the video game crash the game was cancelled.
A game called Diner was released in 1984, exclusively for the Intellivision home console and is a sequel to BurgerTime. Diner was never released for any other system and as a result is one of the most highly sought after games on the Intellivision.
BurgerTime is still very relevant to this day and has been included in many different arcade compilation games. Also in 2007, Namco would release a new version of BurgerTime called BurgerTime Delight for the iOS store. The most recent BurgerTime game was BurgerTime World Tour which was a downloadable title for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii and the PC as well.
