Burger Blaster

Burger Blaster is an arcade shooter with a twist created by Scott D. Ramsay and published in the January 1988 Compute!'s PC Magazine.

Here's a fast-paced arcade-style game with a surrealistic twist Hamburger parts are flying through the air, and you must shoot them down in the correct order to make complete hamburgers and score points. It's far into the future, and centralization, automation, and mass merchandising have reached new heights. The giant fast-food chains now make all of their hamburgers in a central factory in the Asteroid Belt and ship them ready-made to the farthest corners of the solar system. Millions of hamburgers an hour are sent to Earth, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and the new colony on Pluto. The right to a daily burger is an important part of the Pan-Planetary Constitution.

But even in the 23rd century, Murphy's law holds true; something could go wrong — so it did. The artificially intelligent Cyburger-XMP computer that makes the hamburgers has gone genuinely berserk, and nobody can do anything to stop it. Hamburger parts are flying through space at near-light speeds, posing a serious threat to interplanetary navigation. Here a beef patty, there a tomato, and everywhere the halves of buns. There's even an occasional aerial hotdog.

How can the people of the planets be fed their daily burger under such circumstances? The Federal Department of Nonpassive Resistance has a solution: The army, using laser guns, will shoot down the hamburger parts in the correct order and collect them into a special tray. First they'll shoot the lower half of a bun, then the patty, then the lettuce, maybe a tomato, and finally, the top bun. A crazy scheme, to be sure, but the government thinks it will work.