Burger Time: A Bizarre Sexual Parable

On the surface, Burger Time was an oddly devised early 1980s video game where you starred as a chef whose quest it was to assemble enormous burgers that happened to be set out in separate layers which you had to access by walking across platforms and ascending and descending ladders. A layer of sandwich is dropped when you manage to walk from one edge of the bun, meat, or vegetable to the other. Obviously there are certain tricks. If you step on the topmost layer, it will also knock down subsequent layers of sandwich below it. While you do this, you must escape the clutches of the evil hot dogs (henceforth referred to as weiners), sunny-side up eggs and, I believe, pickles, sliced ones. You may encounter further foes later, but I've only ever made it to the sixth stage. If you want to know more about Burger Time, you can play it here, or ask my old buddy Matt Moss, the gamemaster. Your only defense against wiley weiners, energetic eggs, and persistent pickles is their extreme mental impairment (read: inability to walk by a ladder without traveling up or down it) and a supply of pepper which can be replenished with, you didn't guess it, ice cream cones. More on this later.


A frightening artist rendition of the classic game, and proof those enemies were pickles.

Perhaps you can already see where I'm headed. First, I realize that parables are generally moral or religious and also a fable is more the place for inanimate objects, but I contend that the chef is the main character, and these outsiders mere symbols. So it's time to assess the thinly-veiled sexual undertones of Burger Time. Disregard the chef as a male character and take note of his pursuit by weiners (judging by the above photo, wrapped sausages is more poignant, i.e. a wrapped weenus), sliced pickles (i.e. circumcised weenI and pickles be salty), and sunny-side up eggs (i.e. fertile eggs, i.e. I'm already stretching it badly at this point). These obstacles come in the face of chef's attempt to complete his daily duties. His only defense against rape by egg, vegetable, and meat product is pepper, clearly pepper spray, which momentarily paralyzes these nemeses. The ladders represent the classes and social milieus through which chef must travel in his lifetime with later stages symbolizing the increased difficulty of rising to such heights as time bears on.

I know what you're thinking: I haven't said shit about the ice cream cones and, it seems like an honors-track middle schooler could have written this. Well, middle schoolers resent that. I'm sure they would do a better job than I have as I reach back to the high school education that taught me every novel has a Jesus figure and maybe something about the number seven in Beloved, a book I beloathed. As for the ice cream cones, well, who doesn't like ice cream. Clearly it symbolizes Ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, hence its ability to replenish your pepper, which bestows upon chef the power to paralyze, a god-like power.

If you want higher-level video game analysis and commentary, look no further than the Angry Video Game Nerd. He even drinks Rolling Rock.