For some real fun and if you've played the game at all, search for some of the perfect Burger Time playthroughs on YouTube. I always enjoy watching experts play games because they are usually playing entirely different games than what the amateurs are playing. Those korean sc players or the street fighter guys at Evo every year are using the same rules but playing different games than you or I. And Burger Time is really different at high levels.

We had a pretty competitive retro scene at Tiburon while I was there, with guys committing their entire lunch hour to put up a decent score in Time Pilot or trying to get a flawless run in Bombjack. One time I went In to work on a Saturday just to defend my Robotron score after I had been alerted by an automatic email from our internal high score site that someone had bested me.

I got pretty good at Burger Time and thought I was respectable until I was schooled by the guy who holds the world record in Pole Position 2 and once played Qbert for 28 hours straight. He showed me how BT is simply the art of grouping, and trying to master that - along with proper pepper management of course - made me a little loopy for a while. There was a time when I would have been like the guy on the left in the MAME t-shirt: just nodding in agreement and saying "yep" to all of this. There something about that game that is...absorbing.

This is the ethos of the @#$%@ future right here.