1982’s Fast Food Is Not Approved by the FDA

Fast Food might be the only video game in history where achieving morbid obesity is its primary objective. This one-of-a-kind twitch title released by obscure developer Telesys in 1982 gives you control over Mighty Mouth, whose sole objective is to eat as much food as he can.

But not the purple pickles. I repeat: not the purple pickles.

As food flies at Mighty Mouth at “sub-gastronomical speeds” (according to the manual), the player is allowed to move about the screen in any direction to consume as many burgers, hot dogs, and milkshakes as possible before the end of the stage.

As is the case in real life, certain items contain more calories than others. The caloric champion in Fast Food is the Cheeseburger, worth a whopping (pun most definitely intended) 20 calories. (If only these calorie counts carried over in to the real world, which would allow the average person to consume 100 cheeseburgers a day and still find themselves in compliance with the FDA’s recommended daily diet.)

While the premise of the game might be simple (and unquestionably stupid), it’s actually quite fun. Fast Food is arcade-style twitch gaming at its finest, requiring total focus in order to make it past even the first few levels. Each stage lasts about 30 seconds, after which the game will proclaim “YOU’RE GETTING FATTER!” and allow you take a quick breather from a grueling round of binge eating.

While gobbling up as much wholly unhealthy food as possible may seem like an easy task, the screen soon fills itself with purple pickles; digesting five of which will cause Mighty Mouth to ‘burp’ and the restaurant to abruptly close (probably due to an inordinate number of health code violations).

To me, Fast Food is an absolute must for any Atari 2600 collector. It can be easily found for under ten bucks, and it’s one of the more bizarre and irreverent games for the system — if not in all of video game history. It’s hard to imagine a game like this being released today, as its subject matter would no doubt garner condemnation from all sorts of different health-interest groups.

While you probably won’t want to spend hours guiding a pair of disembodied lips around a nondescript screen for hours, Fast Food is an absolute blast in small spurts.