Food Fight can only exist as a video game, it is a perfect representation of a time and platform. It is colorful in a way that arcade games were only beginning to be. The arcade cabinet has beautiful side art. It pops. It has a gorgeous blue control panel. No other cabinet was cut the way this one was, with the pie forming the top edge.
You are a kid – Charley Chuck – and you want to eat the ice cream cone that’s over on the other side of the screen. I love games that present universal truths and relatable problems to solve. “Give me ice cream.” That works. Standing in the way of Charley Chuck are four Italian chefs and a series of open manholes. Unlike the stereotype of the Italian grandmother, these four guys don’t want this kid to eat. Assisting both Charley and his enemies in this conflict are massive piles of throwable food laying around each individual board.
It’s chaos, and Food Fight challenges you to be swift. After your first game you can pick what level you’d like to start (up to where your previous game ended). It allows you to get comfortable and skip the first few easy boards. The gameplay loop is to find yourself on the far right side of the board, with the ice cream on the left.
Each level starts out differently thanks to random generation. You have to quickly imagine a path that takes you to the cone before it drips away. You don’t have unlimited time to do so. The cone drips and when it is completely gone, you lose a life.
My favorite arcade games tend to be those with unique controls. At first, Food Fight doesn’t look like it would qualify. It appears to be a joystick and push button. However, the joystick is analog, and has two potentiometers attached. You can nudge the joystick a bit to aim Charley Chuck without moving him. If you come to a watermelon, you can have Charley Chuck stand on it. If you nudge the joystick in a direction and hold down the “Throw” button, he will endlessly throw watermelon chunks at the chefs. Who respawn. Charley Chuck won’t be moving when the player does this, so essentially – when watermelons are available – it becomes a game of having him throw a weapon in a circle to rack up points. You do eventually have to run over and get the cone, but when the Gimbal joystick is working correctly, it’s a slick tactic. They didn’t have to put this in. Other versions of the game don’t really allow for it. It’s satisfying when it works.
Today’s instance of Atari announced another game in the Food Fight line for the Atari VCS. I have it – it’s mostly an arena shooter, but you can walk around a town and do stuff. One of those things you could not do in town when I tried it out was throw food at other people, rendering the whole thing a sort of mismanagement of the intellectual property. So not ideal, but I don’t remember falling down open manholes in the open world town either, so you get the good with the bad, I guess.
This is a great video with Jonathan Hurd, the creator of Food Fight. You get the banana story and “music lining up with instant replay” story as well. There is a lot of trivia that surrounds the game – the fact that it exists at all is because Atari was trying to negotiate General Computer away after General Computer made kits (Super Missle Attack) to plug into Missile Command arcade machines. Atari would have been happy to pay them, never to hear from them again but instead we got this game.
Reading this interview with Hurd, I was taken by what he said at the end. “I always admired Robotron and thought it was the most exciting game ever developed. In fact, the high levels (100+) of Food Fight were intended to be like Robotron in terms of their speed and intensity.” High levels? Level 100? I’ve had this thing in my house for over 10 years and I thought getting to level 20 was a reasonable good game. For many of these articles, I am pretty much done with exploring what a game offers, but in doing one last bit of research, I’m wondering if my time with this game is only really beginning.