Pressure Cooker

 

In Pressure Cooker, you play the role of a head chef in a fast-food hamburger restaurant - all by yourself. You've got to cook...under pressure.

There's an order board at the bottom of the screen which specifies which ingredients - tomato, onion, lettuce, cheese - the customers want on their burgers. In higher levels, customers will order burgers with combinations of two or more ingredients. Ingredients shoot out at the chef in random order. If you need a cheese to complete an order for a burger, and out shoots a onion, press the fire button. Once you catch the unwanted ingredient, it will be bounced back and another ingredient will shoot out. Once you get the ingredient you want, you can complete the order for the burger. Then it's off to a second screen, the wrapping room, where you must drop the burger into the proper colored wrapper chute. Then it's back to the screen one to build another burger.

Programmer Garry Kitchen got the inspiration for Pressure Cooker while waiting in line at a Burger King restaurant. "I saw that they were using a conveyor belt to move the hamburgers and buns through the grill, and that was it ...the rest is history, as they say."

Garry described how he pushed the 2600 to its memory limits: "Pressure Cooker was a technological nightmare in a lot of ways. Particularly, using RAM (which is scarce in the 2600) to build the hamburgers, have the chef pick up and carry the finished burger, display all the ingredients' colors, to put in the second screen to wrap the food, etc."

At the beginning of the game (and each new level), a musical tune plays for around 10 seconds. A softer tune continuously plays in the background while you "work." "The Atari 2600 sound chip was out of key; it was never meant to do music, only sounds. Only certain notes on the scale could be done in tune, the rest were sour. So, we made a musical staff of only the good notes (probably about 50% of the regular staff) and gave it to a consultant musician, explaining to him that we needed a jingle, but he could only use this list of notes. He thought we were crazy, but he did a good job of writing a little jingle that sounded completely in tune, which was our goal." It's a catchy tune. I find myself humming it. The jingle runs through my head quite often.

I've often wondered what it's like to work at a fast food hamburger restaurant; Pressure Cooker satisfies that curiosity and hunger. This game is a gem - I have been meaning to spotlight Pressure Cooker in a 2600 Treasure Chest game review.

Back in the 1980s, Activision used to give out embroidered game club patches if you got a high score, took a picture of your TV screen, and mailed it to them. Here is the high score to shoot for and club name:

Short Order Squad: 45,000 points

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