BurgerTime
Overview
I reviewed BurgerTime a while back, which you'll see in the Review and Player Notes. As an arcade title, it's nothing to write home about, with this review focusing on the NES version. It's been edited since it was first posted in August 2024 to integrate the Nintendo Power review sections and a few other small changes.
Review
BurgerTime was one of the golden age arcade games by Bally Midway (one of the big manufacturers at the time) that was brought over from Japan (the original Japanese name being Hamburger) and was one of the smaller hits of the arcade era, involving platforms, ladders, and running around trying to walk over hamburger patties before getting boxed in by enemies, namely, the pickle, the fried egg, and the sausage. It was no Pac-Man or Donkey Kong and certainly more successful than the sadly out-of-print High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, Second Edition makes it seem, comparing it to Atari's Food Fight. It was one of the games that Mattel Electronics secured rights to for home console and computer releases and promoted it heavily for Intellivision with a memorably goofy commercial.
Additionally, Mattel Electronics had a license to produce some sequels. It never ported the arcade sequel Peter Pepper's Ice Cream Factory, instead commissioning their French offices to make PizzaTime (also never released)...though in 1987 Mattel Electronics' successor company INTV Corporation released Diner. I remember playing BurgerTime on the NES, which Data East ported and released themselves through their American subsidiary Data East USA. INTV ironically couldn't get the NES rights due to restrictions on their licensees making games for other systems, and while it became a NES licensee, if briefly, it only managed to release Monster Truck Rally for the NES before going bankrupt. I do talk about INTV and its other games (like the Game Boy version of Battleship) when going through the archives of Nintendo Power.
BurgerTime over time got a bunch of re-releases and other titles, generally running the gamut from average to terrible, and never really broke out of its shell. Donkey Kong had "Donkey Kong '94" which evolved into Mario vs. Donkey Kong and of course there was the spin-off Donkey Kong Country, with Pac-Man trying new spin-offs like Pac-in-Time or and Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, even if they didn't do so well. BurgerTime would stay as itself, even after Data East went bankrupt in 2003 and its assets were purchased by G-Mode.
BurgerTime for the NES isn't perfect because the NES port runs faster than the arcade game (plus the arcade version has deeper, richer colors), which makes it harder. BurgerTime Deluxe, despite being a Game Boy (original) game is a much better title, anyway.
Player Notes
This review was posted after I posted the review for BurgerTime Deluxe, and while I remarked that BurgerTime never went far as a franchise, it was always a long shot, as the gameplay was fairly basic and the characters uncompelling, which is why Peter Pepper has mostly been relegated to cameos.
Port & Rerelease Notes
According to Wikipedia, the original BurgerTime saw ports on the major systems of the early 1980s under Mattel Electronics (Intellvision obviously, but also the Atari 2600, the TI-99 series, the Apple II, the IBM-PC, the Aquarius, the ColecoVision, and the Coleco Adam). The NES version (and the Famicom Disk System) was published by Data East themselves, and probably the MSX version. There weren't any ports since, though...not officially, anyway.
Screenshots
