Dizzy - Fast Food

I first saw Dizzy Fast Food on a floppy disk from a classmate in fourth grade. It didn't seem worth mentioning — or so I thought back then, until I spent an hour and a half in front of the monitor.

It's a simple arcade title from Codemasters from 1992 where you control Dizzy the egg in a maze full of food. The task is straightforward: collect fast food, avoid obstacles, survive as long as possible. No story, no dialogue, no plot twists. Pure arcade in the spirit of those little games Codemasters was churning out back then — cheap, quick, and surprisingly addictive.

The controls are minimalist, the maze repeats, and the difficulty ramps up at a pace that anyone who's played Pac-Man knows well: smooth sailing at first, chaos before long. Dizzy moves across the screen with that characteristic stiffness of early DOS arcades — you either get used to it or you don't. Power-ups are there, they help, but they won't save you if you simply can't keep up. The game doesn't punish you for bad luck — it punishes you for being slow.

Fast Food was part of a series of smaller Dizzy games that Codemasters distributed as a budget title. It wasn't aspiring to anything grand. Today it's aged exactly as expected: graphics are functional, sound is minimal, depth is nonexistent. But that was never a problem for it, because nobody expected depth — they expected five minutes of fun, and that's what it delivers.

Today you'll run it in your browser and be done in twenty minutes. If you enjoyed Pac-Man and have at least a lukewarm relationship with Codemasters and their prolific era of cheap games, Fast Food is a nice reminder of when arcade didn't have to be more than a maze and moving hamburgers. Don't expect anything more and you won't be disappointed.