Video Game / Burger Shop

Put your food-making skills to the test!

Burger Shop is a Time Management Game developed by GoBit Games where you serve fast food to customers of various kinds; it was first released for PC desktop in 2007. A sequel to the game, Burger Shop 2, was released in 2009, with more food items and customer types. Both games have since been ported to Steam and mobile devices. A third installment, Burger Shop 3, was announced on January 2023 - 14 years after its predecessor.

In the first game, you receive a mysterious blueprint from an unknown source. Having nothing to do, you follow it and manage to build BurgerTron 2000, a burger-making robot. With its abilities, you decide to start a restaurant empire across the globe.

In the second game, after your success, now you suddenly find yourself in a dumpster bin and all your restaurants have been closed down. Worse, you have no memory of what happened at all. So you embark to solve the mystery, and while at that, rebuild your business.

Gameplay is fairly simple. Customers order certain food items, BurgerTron produces their individual ingredients, and you will need to assemble them into complete food (sometimes also using external machines from BurgerTron) to deliver the customers' orders. For example, to make a simple cheeseburger you'll need to assemble a beef patty, a slice of cheese, a top bun, and a bottom bun. While initially easy, more and more complex items will be added to the menu (the additions of which you can choose between levels, alongside mechanisms and power-ups to make their elaboration easier), and new customer types will be introduced, which can either be more demanding or have special quirks. Burger Shop 2 also has the levels change between three different menus, each with their own sets of food items and ingredients.

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Burger Shop provides examples of:

• Aerith and Bob: In the first game you meet your alien friends Zako, Kik, and Tuggo. In the second you meet another alien named Becky.
• Affectionate Parody: "Becky's Burger Shop Mania Deluxe", and alien restaurant seen at the end of the second game, is a parody of other Time Management Games like Diner Dash and Cake Mania, including the ability to upgrade shoes and machines, as well as her motivation for working to save her uncle's mines. Similarly, the detective is a parody of Hidden Object Games where you play as a detective, and he keeps bringing you useless things like gramophones and bowling balls.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In the second game, in the future, you would give sentience to BurgerTron and he would lead a robot revolution. This would prompt BurgerBot to travel back in time to prevent it, kicking off the game's plot.
• Aliens Love Human Food: The aliens have been searching for the perfect food for a while, with the BurgerTron being one of their attempts to make it. You finally make it for them: triple bacon cheeseburgers with ranch dressing.
• Aliens Speaking English: Near the end of the game you encounter aliens, who can communicate perfectly with you. In fact, they're the maker of BurgerTron's blueprint, so they can even write robot-building manuals in English.
• All There in the Manual: Each customer has a name, but they're only revealed in the end credits after you finish the Story Mode of either game. In gameplay, they're only referred to with monikers like "Businesswoman", "Cowboy", "Surfer", and so on.
• Arrange Mode: Both games have Challenge Mode and Relax Mode, unlocked after you finish each restaurant in Story Mode. In Challenge Mode, customers will come endlessly, but they get more and more impatient after each minute. The game ends when a customer leaves. Relax Mode is the opposite, it's also endless but the customers will always stay at max patience.
• Big Eater: Several customer types order a lot of food:
  • The Cowboy always orders two meat items. In the first game, this means two burgers. In the second game, he can also order two breakfast sandwiches with meat, or two slabs of steak.
  • The Surfer orders nothing but burgers. Sometimes, he orders only a single chicken burger. Other times, he orders three triple cheeseburgers with ketchup and ranch dressing. In the second game, in addition to exclusively ordering english muffins or donuts (he'll randomly choose either of those) in the breakfast menu, he can also order two or three whole pizzas for himself in the diner menu.
  • The Sports Fan orders big burgers. A double cheeseburger is the smallest burger he will order.
  • The Sumo Wrestler always orders four food items.
• City with No Name: It's never specified at all where the games take place, and the locations are only called by generic names like "Diner", "Saloon", "Boardwalk", and yes, "City".
• Cloudcuckoolander: The Clowns. They will order things that aren't in the menu, ranging from mundane (like a burger with four beef patties) to bizarre (such as an ice cream with ketchup and mustard or an outright empty french fry bag). There's a humorous cutscene in Expert Mode where the aliens hire a clown as a business advisor, as one of their many screw-ups.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: You will have to be this if a Clown shows up and orders something like pizza with whipped cream or ice cream with ketchup.
• Embarrassing Middle Name: In the both games' end credits, the Punk is given the name of B-Rock Badly. The second game's credits add that his middle name is Wainwright, which is followed by an advice for you to never refer to him with that.
  B-Rock's middle name is Wainwright. Do not, under any circumstances, call him this.
• An Entrepreneur Is You: Basically the game's plot in short. Your character starts a restaurant chain upon building BurgerTron.
• Everyone Calls Them Barkeep: The customers are only referred to by their types, like the businesswoman, the cowboy, the punk, etc. Their real names are only revealed after you beat the story mode.
• Excuse Plot: The plot of the first game is pretty bare bones: you made a burger-making robot, so you decide to start a restaurant chain with it, the only variation being the circumstances surrounding each restaurant you open; later in the Expert Mode's storyline, the aliens you entrusted with your restaurants while you were away turned out to suck at the job, so you have to fix their problems. The second game, on the other hand, has a more elaborate story.
• Extended Gameplay: In both games, after you beat the Story Mode, you unlock the Expert Mode, which is an entirely new set of levels. All food items and customers are unlocked from the start (yes, you can have customers ordering triple bacon cheeseburger right from the start) and you need to serve more customers to complete the levels. Also, you start serving four customers at a time halfway-through. The first game's Expert Mode is a continuation of the Story Mode, but the second game's Expert Mode has no plot. In both games, finishing the Expert Mode gives you a second epilogue.
• The Faceless: In gameplay, your customers are facing against the camera, so you never see their faces from the front.
• Featureless Protagonist: Your player character is never shown on screen in the first game. In the second game, the one time they're shown, it's in silhouettes.
• Flying Saucer: The aliens' spaceship, where the first game's last restaurant is located, is disc-shaped.
• The Generic Guy: Random Guy/The Dude/Red Flannel Guy, the first customer you're introduced to. He doesn't have any food preferences, meaning he can potentially order anything, but he doesn't follow any ordering patterns either.
• Granola Girl: The Hippie customer. She's a vegetarian so she never orders anything with meat, and the game description for her says "she needs a good food in between protesting".
• Gratuitous Ninja: The second game introduces the Ninja as a new customer type. His quirk is that he can order items from all three menus (breakfast, lunch, dinner) at once. He doesn't exactly do anything ninja-like.
• Gray Is Useless: Already completed individual items in orders are grayed out to prevent filling out the same thing for one customer twice.
• Hair-Trigger Temper:
  • The Punk is the most impatient costumer type, with only two patience bars.
  • Subverted with the Dog Lover from the second game, who starts out with the same patience as the Punk, but her description states that it's simply because she's "in a hurry", and the player has a means of increasing her patience.
• Hidden Depths:
  • It's mentioned in the first game's "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue that the Businessman, who presents himself as a simple-minded Workaholic, likes to grow roses in his spare time, and seeks to win a flower contest with them.
  • The Clown's blurb in the second game's credits mentions that he'd like to start his own restaurant business, although might not be able to use his Bizarre Taste in Food as part of the menu.
• Hypocritical Humor: The Sumo Wrestler and the Shirtless Guy both show up to your restaurant topless, but people will only get angry at the latter. The Sumo Wrestler, however, won't get angry at him.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Plenty of levels follow a name scheme of various customer types based on which ones are the most common during them, such as "Cowboys and Cowgirls" or "Businessmen and Punks".
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Like most other Time Management Games, all customers of the same type are identical to each other. The end credits state that each of them is an individual person with their own name and a short story (the businesswoman is named Virginia Richman, for example), but gameplay-wise you can have three identical businesswomen at the counter at the same time. Lampshaded with the Dude's description in the second game's end credits, which mentions that he has identical triplet siblings who often come to eat alongside him.
• In Name Only: The Boardwalk restaurant from the second game, which introduced completely different customers and is the second restaurant instead of fourth, while all other restaurants are re-visited in order. Actually, the second game's new Circus restaurant is a better counterpart for the first game's Boardwalk, since it introduces the same customers (Clowns, Schoolgirls, and Families), and is located between the City and Sports Bar restaurants, just like the Boardwalk one in the first game.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The player character suffers this in the second game's beginning. You completely remember what happened in the first game, but can't recall at all what happened between that and you waking up in a dumpster.
• Mathematician's Answer: The Businessman's entry in the second game's ending credits.
  When asked what his business consists of, Bob says, "Making money." Queried for details on how he makes this money he says, "By having revenues exceed expenditures."
• Mechanically Unusual Class: The second game introduces some customers with unique mechanics:
  • Instead of immediately ordering, the Old Chap will request a menu book instead. Once given the menu book, he will spend a while reading it before giving out his order. The game's ending credits like to put humor into this by stating that the Old Chap also wants to see a menu when he goes to get a tattoo.
  • The Dog Lover starts out with a very low patience (identical to the Punk), but you can give her dog a biscuit, which raises her patience to very high. Using the biscuit isn't necessarily required, however. This dynamic is even quoted in her entry from the ending credits:
    ''Summer says, "Every time you give a dog a biscuit, an angel gets its wings."
  • The Shirtless Guy makes other customers angry with his shirtlessness, making their patience drain faster. You can give him a shirt to stop the effect. Like the Dog Lover, giving him the shirt isn't obligatory, and once he leaves his effect on the other customers is also gone.
• Mission-Pack Sequel: The second game adds new customers and has three types of menus instead of just one: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. While the breakfast and dinner menus are completely new, the lunch menu is the exact same as the first game's menu. Gameplay-wise, almost nothing is different from the first game, aside from a small overhaul for the power-ups.
• Name-Tron: Your burger-making robot is named BurgerTron 2000. There's also BurgerBot, a smaller robot that is stated to be BurgerTron's sidekick and acts as your assistant.
• Non-Ironic Clown: The Clown (named Mr. Giggles in the end credits), who, weird food preferences aside, is perfectly happy with his job. In both games, the restaurants where you first encounter him (Boardwalk in first game, Circus in second) are also where child customers first appear, implying he is well-liked by children.
• No Plot? No Problem!: Unlike in the first game, the Expert Mode of the second game has no plot at all.
• Power Copying: Not exactly power, but rather food orders. The second game introduces Mimes, which copy the previous customer's order.
• Put on a Bus: Downplayed with the aliens, who, while returning in the second game with all the other costumer types from the first game, are only encountered in the last three levels of Expert Mode.
• Repetitive Name: The ending credits of Burger Shop 2 give the Dog Lover's name as Summer Summers.
• Robot Buddy: The BurgerBot. When it's fully charged, it can instantly deliver a customer's orders, no matter how complicated. The ending notes that he even made friends with Buck the Cowboy. He's also more sentient in the second game, and can complain to the player if they haven't used him for a while.
• Sequel Reset: The first game ends with you becoming a galaxy-spanning restaurant owner. The second game starts with your restaurant empire ruined for some unknown reason, and you have to rebuild it again. In fact, all the locations in the second game are the same as the first one, with only one new restaurant (Circus).
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: In the first game's introductory cutscene to the Beach Hut, the player character decides to take a cruise, only for the ship to hit what BurgerTron refers to as a "non-frontal synoptic scale low-pressure system over tropical waters with organized convection and definite cyclonic surface wind circulation." The obstacle in question is, in other words, a rather big typhoon.
• Symbol Swearing: If you finish a customer's order while they're at minimum patience, they'll shout a string of symbols instead of the usual "Awesome Service", "Bad Service", etc.
• Take That!: In the second game, the player hires a detective to investigate the saboteur who had shut down all their restaurants. The detective proceeds to find a bunch of useless items and insists that they are clues, and is eventually dismissed. This is likely a spoof of mystery Hidden Object Games, where you are required to collect a bunch of unrelated items before you can actually get the clues you need, and yet such games continually praise the player for their amazing detective skills.
• Trademark Favorite Food: The defining factor of each customer, aside from their patience and special quirks, is their food preference. The businesswoman, for example, doesn't always order meat items, but if she does it will be chicken. The cowgirl prefers strawberry ice cream over other flavors. The aliens take it to the extreme, as they will always order Triple Bacon Cheeseburgers with Ranch Dressing every single time.
• A True Story in My Universe: Midway through the first game, in the intro to the Beach Hut, your character licenses their restaurant chain's name to GoBit Games, who are interested in making "a computer game with a 'restaurant game mechanic' based on [their] unique food service techniques." In exchange, they get a large amount of money and a private cruise.
• Unconventional Food Order: This is the main gimmick of Clown-type customers, who will order nonsensical things that other customers won't order, such as ice cream with mustard or a pizza with whipped cream; you have to fulfill their orders regardless. This isn't always the case however, as Clowns can also order more conventional food (but still rare for other costumers), including a burger with four stacks of beef patties or one that combines beef and chicken.
• Walking Shirtless Scene:
  • The aptly named Shirtless Guy customer type, who walks into your diner shirtless. His shirtlessness offends other customers, so you have to give him a shirt immediately.
  • The Sumo Wrestler is also shirtless, but he won't offend anyone.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In the first game's epilogue, Joyce the Cowgirl's text describes her quitting as a cowgirl and joining a circus. In the sequel, she returns as a cowgirl with no explanation on her circus career. Her epilogue text also says nothing, only jokes on how much she likes dairy products.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue:
  • In the credit roll after you beat the first game's Story Mode, there's a short humorous blurb for each customer, describing what happened to them since the game's events; this is where you learn their actual names. You also get a different epilogue upon beating Expert Mode.
  • Subverted in the second game, which, while having credits with identical blurbs to the first, simply gives further information for every costumer without explaining what they did in the story's aftermath.
• White Collar Worker: The Businesswoman and the Businessman. The businesswoman is the second customer type you encounter, and she's characterized as a young career woman who is a bit less patient than The Dude and has a fondness for chicken and chocolate. She's otherwise a standard customer. The businessman is introduced a bit later, and is a balding old man who always order the same items.
• Workaholic: The Businessman always orders the same items every time (including for each menu in the second game), only varying between wanting or not wanting certain additions like ketchup at best. According to his description, it's so that he can save brainpower for business-related stuff.

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