Mangià

Mangià was published by Spectravision for the Atari 2600 in 1983 and it is one of the strangest ideas ever released on the machine. The title is the Italian imperative for eat!, and that is exactly the job. You play a boy at the kitchen table while his mother sets down one plate of pasta after another, and she will not stop until his stomach literally bursts — which the game duly shows you.

You cannot possibly eat it all, so the real mechanic is cheating. A cat sits in the window, a dog runs across the floor, and you can throw plates to either of them. The catch is that mother occasionally turns around, and being caught brings a cruelly logical punishment: another serving. The whole game is therefore a tug-of-war over attention. You watch the mother, judge when she is looking away, and keep a running count of how much you can still get through yourself.

Technically it is modest even for 1983. One screen, a handful of sprites, no progression — it simply speeds up until you lose. The fun lasts minutes rather than hours, and after a few attempts you have seen everything it can do.

What stays with you is the black humour and a premise nobody would come up with today: a game in which food is the enemy and parental care is the weapon. The North American cartridge is also among the rarest on the entire 2600, so most people who know of this title have never actually held it. That alone makes it worth a few minutes, simple as it is.

Mangià runs on oldgame.cz directly in the browser, with nothing to install.