BURGERTIME GAME PLAY

The object of the game is to build a number of hamburgers while avoiding enemy foods. The player controls the protagonist, chef Peter Pepper, with a four-position joystick and a “pepper” button.

Each level is a maze of platforms and ladders in which giant burger ingredients (bun, meat patty, tomato, lettuce and cheese) are arranged. When Peter walks the full length of an ingredient, it falls to the level below, knocking down any ingredient that happens to be there. A burger is completed when all of its vertically aligned ingredients have been dropped out of the maze and onto a waiting plate. The player must complete all burgers to finish the board.

Three types of enemy food items wander the maze: Mr. Hot Dog, Mr. Pickle (who doesn’t appear until level 3), and Mr. Egg. The player can score extra points by either crushing them under a falling ingredient or dropping an ingredient while they are on it. In the latter case, the ingredient falls two extra levels for every enemy caught on it. Crushed or dropped enemies return to the maze after a short time, with crushed enemies appearing on the edges and dropped enemies respawning where they stopped falling. (If a dropped enemy falls to the bottom of a burger, it will climb back up to the nearest platform.) Dropping enemies is much riskier, but it also awards more points and allows the levels to be finished faster.

At the start of the game, the player is given five pepper shots to use against enemies. Pressing the button causes Peter to shake a cloud of pepper in the direction he is facing; any enemy touching the cloud is briefly stunned, and Peter can safely move through them. Ice cream (levels 1 and 4), coffee (2 and 5), and French fries (3 and 6) appear when a certain number of ingredients are dropped, awarding bonus points (500 for ice cream, 1,000 for coffee, and 1,500 for French fries) and one extra pepper shot when collected.

There are six boards of increasing difficulty, with more burgers/ingredients, more enemies, and/or layouts that make it easier for Peter to become cornered. After the player completes the sixth board, the cycle repeats. One life is lost whenever Peter touches a non-stunned enemy, and the game ends once all lives are lost. The number of points required to gain extra lives varies between ports.

Mattel Electronics obtained the rights to BurgerTime from Data East and released the Intellivision version in 1983. That year, they also released versions for the Atari 2600, Apple II, Aquarius, and, as a self-booting disk, the IBM PC. A version from Data East for the TI-99/4A was published in 1984. A ColecoVision port was published by Coleco in May 1984. Ports were released for the Famicom in 1985, MSX in 1986, Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987 and Famicom Disk System in 1988.

In Japan, Game Machine listed Hamburger as the 11th highest-grossing arcade video game of 1982. Game Machine later listed Hamburger on their June 15, 1983 issue as being the twenty-third most-successful table arcade unit of the month.

Following its North American debut at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) show in November 1982, it was reviewed by Video Games magazine, which listed it as the show’s fourth best game, while saying it was the “stupidest, silliest game ever, and that’s why you couldn’t get people off the Burger Time games with a crowbar!” The review praised the “music, challenging mazes, and comical” characters.

Computer and Video Games gave it a positive review, comparing the level structure to Donkey Kong (1981), stating that BurgerTime has “a charm all its own” and praising the controls. The Deseret News called BurgerTime “one of the real surprises of 1983 for the Intellivision” and gave the ColecoVision version three-and-a-half stars out of four. Computer Games magazine gave the ColecoVision and Coleco Adam versions a positive review, stating that “the terrific flavor” of the arcade game remains but “the playfield has been greatly reduced”.

BurgerTime received a Certificate of Merit in the category of “1984 Videogame of the Year (Less than 16K ROM)” at the 5th annual Arkie Awards.

An arcade spin-off, Peter Pepper’s Ice Cream Factory (1984), and an arcade sequel, Super BurgerTime (スーパーバーガータイム) (1990), were not widely released. Super BurgerTime stars Peter Pepper Jr. and allows two players to play at once. It is fairly true to the original, but with many added features and a different style of graphics.

A console-only sequel, Diner, was created after the 1984 purchase of Intellivision from Mattel by INTV Corp. It was programmed by Ray Kaestner, the programmer of the Intellivision version of BurgerTime. In Diner, Peter Pepper must kick balls of food so that they roll off platforms and down ramps to land on a large plate at the bottom of the screen, while avoiding or crushing enemy food items that are trying to stop him.

BurgerTime Deluxe was released for the Game Boy in 1991 featuring similar gameplay to the original arcade game. BurgerTime Deluxe was re-released for the Nintendo Switch through the Nintendo Classics service.

A crossover with The Flintstones  titled The Flintstones: BurgerTime in Bedrock was released on Game Boy Color in 2000.

Namco released BurgerTime Delight for mobile devices in 2007. It includes “new graphics, characters and power-ups”. There are six “arcade levels” and eight enhanced mode levels with perils of falling ice and rising fire from the grill. Besides the pepper of the classic game, there is now a salt shaker, that when collected stuns all enemies on the screen.

A 3D update, BurgerTime World Tour, was released in 2011 for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, and in 2012 for WiiWare.^[28] It was delisted from Xbox Live Arcade in April 2014. G-Mode and XSEED Games released a re-imagining of the game on October 8, 2019, titled BurgerTime Party!, for the Nintendo Switch, with new modes and redesigns.

In 2024, the Chili’s restaurant chain obtained the license for BurgerTime to create a browser-based game called Chili’s Big Smasher BurgerTime. In this version of the game, players control the franchise mascot Joe ChiliHead in a quest to create Big Smasher Burgers across six levels of gameplay. Players who participated also had the chance to win prizes such as free burgers for life.

The NES and FDS versions were available on the Wii Virtual Console. Its Game Boy counterpart BurgerTime Deluxe was released for the 3DS Virtual Console in 2011. The NES version is also included in the 2017 compilation Data East All-Star Collection for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The 1982 arcade version was released through the Arcade Archives series for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch on July 30, 2020.

*Some of the content information above was provided by Wikipedia and KLOV (Killer List of Video Games).

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