The Game: You’re a disembodied pair of jaws – sort of like that old wind-up clacking teeth toy, minus the wind-up part. And the feet. Food flies at you from the left side of the screen, and your job is to gobble all of it up that you can reach. (Try not to dwell on the digestive process involved with a disembodied pair of jaws – presumably there’s a grateful disembodied stomach somewhere in this food chain.) The more snacks you snag, the faster the food flies. Beware of the purple peppers, though – you can only eat so many of them before your jaws erupt in a cataclysmic, game-ending “BURP!” (Telesys, 1982)
Memories: This is another game to file away under the category of “games that simply would not be made or marketed today.” As the healthy living movement (not a bad thing) collides and coalesces with the zombie-like conformity movement (almost always a bad thing) and some collective decision has been taken somewhere that overweight people are now as offensive to the general public as chain-smokers, a game like Fast Food – which congratulates players between levels with the tongue-in-cheek message “You’re Getting Fatter” – just wouldn’t make it to the store shelves today. (At this rate, I’m waiting for Pac-Man, with its unrestrained eating, to become somehow politically incorrect.)
Fast Food is a frenetically fun little number, definitely one for the crowd that has mastered quick joystick movements – because that’s the only way to survive once “You’re Getting Fatter” has crossed your screen a couple of times. As the game’s speed increases, of course, it becomes harder and harder to avoid accumulating those purple peppers, so it’s not if, but when, you’ll eventually run into Fast Food’s slightly impolite ending. There are gastronomical odds against you surviving too long in this game.
On a side note, it seems like tiny Telesys always turned out neat little games accompanied by great artwork and fun advertising. And yet somehow, maybe just by virtue of getting to the table just before the pre-crash feast was over, they managed not to become as well known as Activision or Imagic.
