Long before NBC turned desperate weight loss into reality TV gold with The Biggest Loser and juvenile diabetes became a high-fructose epidemic, children of the ’80s fought their own battle against the bulge—a desperate, fast-paced struggle in which they learned that their favorite junk foods were literally trying to destroy them in an 8-bit battle to the death. Just like Biggest Loser, plenty of running was required to win, seasoning had to be used sparingly (if at all), and getting anywhere near a hot dog spelled certain doom.
If you lived through this war—from which you doubtless emerged many quarters poorer, but bearing a unique wisdom shared only by your fellow veterans—you may be nodding your head right now, perhaps with a rueful smile on your face, possibly sighing the name of our pain: BurgerTime.
While never as popular as its arcade-ruling forebears Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, BurgerTime distilled its own brand of uniquely addictive gameplay by fusing together a rough blend of those two games. Like Donkey Kong, your adipose protagonist—Peter Pepper, a savagely ironic name for someone forced to hoard the stuff so frantically—had to navigate countless ladders as fast as his stubby little legs could go; like Pac-Man, he had to do it while avoiding a gang of murderous supernatural beings (anthropomorphous foodstuffs bearing the Tarantino-esque monikers Mr. Hot Dog, Mr. Pickle, and Mr. Egg) hellbent on killing him. His only weapons were dashes of pepper—which merely froze the thugs in place for a few moments—or, somewhat bizarrely, giant burger ingredients that could be dropped from the upper levels by walking across them. Bun, lettuce, (all-beef?) patty, bun: BurgerTime.
The game turns 30 this year, and while many of the facts surrounding its creation are shrouded in the digital mists of arcade lore, we’re going to assume it came out during the summer, because that’s exactly when something called BurgerTime should happen. Nestled between the Gorf and Zaxxon cabinets, it beckoned susceptible youth with the innocuous-seeming exhortation “C’mon! Let’s get cookin’!” only to eject them back out onto the hot asphalt a few turns later—sadder, stunned, bereft of tokens.
“It was one of the few games that were appealing to women at the time,” says IGN editor Sam Claiborn. “It wasn’t about shooting stuff, it was just about goofy food. It isn’t quite as accessible as Pac-Man, but it still boils down to, you know, escaping things. You figure out pretty quickly that you need to do that first. That’s a clear concept. But that isn’t enough, and you have to figure out how to corral your enemies—it has this kind of Pied Piper feel that makes it really a pretty neat game. It’s still pretty ludicrous that you’re getting hot dogs to run across hamburgers, and you can’t pull that concept into reality, but you understand all the parts of it.”
Like a lot of the games from the early ’80s, BurgerTime stretches into infinity while adhering to rigid patterns; although you could conceivably play it for hours, it really only has six screens, and if you get the steps down, playing it becomes more a matter of outwitting the game than trying to anticipate it—a distinction understood by BurgerSavants like Bryan Wagner, who broke his own world record score when he logged a mind-boggling 11,512,500 points in 2008. But that doesn’t mean the game is easy, or even linear; it follows its own punishing logic, and even a pro like Claiborn—who rebuilt his own BurgerTime cabinet and has played the game while eating a burger—insists, “I’m not good at the game. I have people come over and play it, and it’s a favorite, but man, I can’t run up a really high score.”
Still, in spite of its unforgiving nature, there’s something irresistible about the game—the ever-evanescent notion that you will one day be able to lead Peter Pepper to a Hot Dog-, Pickle- and Egg-free nirvana, where it’s always BurgerTime for everyone and there’s enough pepper for all. The game certainly racked up enough quarters to spawn its share of sequels, including Peter Pepper’s Ice Cream Factory (which Claiborn dismisses as “an abomination”) and Super BurgerTime, which starred Peter Pepper Jr.—of course—and introduced simultaneous two-player action. (Of the original game’s Wikipedia page, which posits the existence of a planned PizzaTime spinoff, Claiborn chuckles, “I’d like to think I started that rumor. That’s my lifelong dream—that’d be so fun to make a top-down, full-on PizzaTime cabinet, with Peter Pepper looking the same, holding a pizza.”)
After the arcade crash of the mid ’80s, when developers went belly up by the dozens and a million copies of the Atari 2600 version of E.T. sat moldering in a mythical desert landfill, both the company that created BurgerTime—Data East—and its U.S. licensor, Bally Midway, bit the dust, leaving poor Peter Pepper lost in binary limbo. Lost, but not forgotten: Last year, the folks at MonkeyPaw Games put together BurgerTime World Tour, a loose remake that wrestled the original game mechanics into a 3D environment and tried to, in the developer’s words, bring the game “into a larger world for the current gaming generation.”
BurgerTime World Tour is certainly bigger, and for anyone who ever went red-faced with rage after getting stuck on a ladder and losing his last life to a dancing fried egg, there’s something undeniably appealing about taking Peter Pepper into more broadly navigable world—in theory, anyway. In practice, nothing beats the mustardy thrill of digging a quarter out of your pocket, hearing it clunk into the machine, and willing that blocky little bastard to clear the bun before Mr. Hot Dog pokes his angry red head up into your tuchus. Industries have been built and crumbled, fortunes have been won and lost, processing power has reached levels we never could have imagined in 1982—but still and forevermore, it remains: BurgerTime.