Video games and the world of culinary arts: from Burger Time to Final Fantasy XV

Nowadays video games are incredibly realistic and are capable of immersing the player in worlds that take your breath away.
One can feel the wastelands of a Death Stranding, the warmth of the cold burning fire in the reassuring bonfires of Dark Souls or the terror given by the white noises of Silent HIll's radio. We learned to get excited as children watching the adventures of our favorite heroes, we got very angry after complicated battles and we also learned to overcome our limits as players, becoming more and more familiar with mechanics that we considered incredible.

If there is something that today, for a mere technical question, nIt has not yet been possible to bring the player closer has been the taste and smell that seems to exist in certain video games.

How many players could have heard theresmell of the soups they give inside the taverns their favorite RPGs?
How many are curious about which is thesmell of Diablo 2 pandemonium?
Who has ever wondered what it tastes like twenty-hearted soup featured in The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild?
And the perfume of the field of flowers where the final sequence of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater?

Video games have very often incorporated within them mechanics related to the kitchen in and of itself. A tangible example can be found in thelatest chapter of Pokémon, with a whole series of mechanics related to the preparation of the best curry on the face of the Galar region; in Daemon X Machina our pilot can be fed to the sound of ice creami in order to be more responsive on the battlefield and in video games like Yakuza go around eating local delicacies it's a way like any other to get experience points.

How did these two things begin to universes?
When did the world of cooking forcefully enter the world of video games?
Let's see it together in this article.

From Burger Time to commercials.

The first video game that the writer comes to mind when it comes to cooking in video games is Burger time area of Data east, an old platform title in which, as a brave cook, we will have the task of making juicy burgers made of pixels by walking over the various layers. In all of this we will find ourselves having to escape dangerous self-propelled cucumbers, not forgetting the threats carried out by egg-shaped characters who want everything but our juicy sandwich.

Burger time it is not exactly a game that puts the kitchen inside it but it is one of the first that does something with the kitchen, in video games. Much similar speech can be done for Tapper, old 1983 Midway title in which he plays a bartender struggling with a clientele thirsty more for beer than for blood. To find something much more specific we will have to wait about ten years and the arrival of the Super Nintendo: it will be a promotional video game that will change the cards.

Little Motoko’s Wonder Kitchen is a video game released in 1993 on the Super NIntendo. The title is a video game developed for advertising purposes for the Japanese giant Aijinomoto in which the player will learn about food through mini-games and cutscenes. The title, poised between the marketta and the bland edutaintment, through a point and click interface puts the kitchen at the center of the play complex for the first time, explaining to the player how to cook a dish using ingredients; all factors that are not obvious considering the typical gameplay of the time.

The world of cooking ended up breaking into the traditional video game universe a couple of years later with the release of Tales Of Phantasia, the first chapter of a well-known series of Japanese role-playing games born from the skilled hands of Namco. The title has a setting from JRPG with semi action combat system; the protagonists, during their wanderings around the world, they will be able to accumulate recipes and ingredients to use to prepare tasty dishes able to provide them with higher quality buffs or heals than they can normally buy.

From then on, more and more video games associated the world of cooking with some mechanics, with titles completely set on the reproduction of the typical practices of the environment.

Is food in video games a symbol?

In the world of video games, food was immediately a very present symbol: Bubble Bobble by Taito associates many typical dishes of the Japanese tradition with increasing amounts of points, in the brand of Kirby the object that is able to refill the health points of our chubby pink thing is nothing more than a juicy tomato. Nowadays heal in titles like Yakuza it is indicative of going to a restaurant or looking for your favorite drink at the machines. In Monster Hunter World o Skyrim, through the kitchen you can get substantial upgrades linked to your own statistics by mixing different ingredients recovered through farming and exploration, giving a very specific meaning to the playful loops of the title.

In The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild ccooking is practically the same as surviving and this mechanism is perhaps the perfect summa of the last ten years of cooking in video games. In the decade that is drawing to a close, cooking in video games has become a slave to the survival genre due to the presence of resources such as food and liquids within these titles. In a survival video game the recipes are subordinated to surviving, the struggle is to obtain ingredients and the taste is very far away. No precious sweets, no Proustian madeleines, just the proteins needed to see the dawn of the next day.

The very act of cooking it has never been fully squeezed into modern videogame proposals: cooking is simply combining ingredients and gameplay mechanics almost never touch the preparation of the food itself, we never talk about ethics related to food, nor do we care to give an extra layer of depth to the thing. Some video games mention food as an object of exchange without going around too much: in Okami, for example, in the role of a divinity embodied in a wolf, it is possible to feed the animals of feudal Japan to the sound of seeds, herbs and pieces of meat, gaining the favor of the latter; limited examples that can serve as guiding lights for a different future

Zen is the art of preparing a good dish.

Il Nintendo DS it was one of the most talked about consoles of its generation due to a certain propensity towards the casual player, the one not interested in statistics or stories but only in gameplay loops capable of hitting him in the brain and wrists. Between cuddling a dog in nintendogs and more, with a Nintendo DS the player can go and experience one of the few titles that puts food preparation at the absolute center of his sense of existence: Cooking Mama.

The title of Office Create, originally released in 2006, for the first time featured the player in the role of a chef like many others struggling with real-world dishes.

The act of cooking was not subordinated to the success of a restaurant, nor to the recovery of health points; cooking in Cooking Mama was really the only thing that mattered and it showed, with some limitations, all the necessary path to obtain a good quality dish. In this journey, helped by a kind of caring mother / teacher, you can discover all the little secrets that lie behind a good dish; from chopping vegetables carefully, to cutting the meat in the right places.

Cooking mama is the best evolution of the cooking sections otherwise brought to the market by titles like Tales Of and has seen, nowadays, just a couple of real children on which to lean tired limbs. The Nintendo brand, dormant for almost five years and devoid of substantial renovations, has left the scepter of power to the only device capable of supporting an innovation in this field: virtual reality.

If you are equipped with a virtual reality viewer you can relive the Cooking Mama experience aiming for greater realism through Cooking simulator, the only title from Big Cheese Games. In Cooking Simulator the player will be behind the skull of a chef grappling with a climb to success, grappling with a head chef in the place of any Gordon Ramsay and grappling with the mandatory simplifications due to the discrepancy between reality and virtual reality. There is not the caciarone fun of Overcooked (a title that we strongly recommend you to recover), nor is the kitchen as an escape from worldliness; Cooking Simulator is a way of re-proposing a job in a simplified way to those who don't do that job.

Escaping from trivialization.

One of the few modern games that has managed to frame the kitchen within an almost all-round pleasant pattern is Final Fantasy XV, the latest chapter in the historic saga of Japanese role-playing games created by Square Enix. In Final Fantasy XV cooking is automatic but it helps even more to feel an integral part of the group of protagonists, giving further realism to the relationships that exist within the royal road trip that animates the title. Final Fantasy XV (exactly like a old scene di F) relegates to food the task of cementing social relations between different supporting actors, giving hilarious curtains and helping the player to love a group of characters without necessarily having to combine expensive cutscenes with other directorial choices.

So in the future of video games, is there room for non-trivial culinary mechanics?
The answer we have to give at the moment is perhaps. In the world of video games so far, cooking has almost always served as an excuse to take care and only a few times have we seen it interact in an interesting way with the other game mechanics; at times it serves as an outlet for the most passionate collectors, grappling with the thousands of recipes present while at other times it serves as a moment for developers in which to give life and voice to the personal stories of their characters.

It will all depend on the control system that the developers put in the player's hand: nowadays we have seen a return to origins, after the intoxication of motion controllers given by the presence of the Wii on the market. Making the culinary mechanics with the unique use of the joypad buttons is not exactly easy but it is something.

Something can be helped by the various sensors that perpetually inhabit the plastic mazes and circuits that are the entrails of the controllers. For now, let's just lay out the culinary books that video games like Fallout 4, World Of Wacraft o Monster Hunter they produced.