The giant hamburger in Donkey Kong Bananza is a beautiful, disgusting triumph

Giant Hamburgers have been a part of gaming for almost as long as I can remember. Specifically, BurgerTime, first released in 1982, is always stalking my conscious mind, haunches taut and ready to pounce from my subconscious at any time.

Why are the burgers so big? Who will eat them? Why are there also big – but not quite as big – pickles, hot dogs, and fried eggs trying to kill me as I trample on these massive, scaffolding-sized patties in an ill-fated attempt to make these massive mounds of meat and bread a reality?

HOLD THE PICKLES

If you google my name and the word “BurgerTime”, you are sure to find multiple instances of me launching some version of these questions out into the internet ether in hopes that these messages in a bottle will someday be returned to my island of burger mystery with some kind of answer. But over 40 years later, nothing has come back. And so, my haunted thoughts of stomping on ridiculously proportioned discs of ground beef remain.

It’s a lonely life, but a stage that pops up later on in the Switch 2 exclusive Donkey Kong Bananza has helped me to see that others out there may share my sick fascination with giant video game hamburgers. While it’s in no way an overt reference to the gastric gaming classic, the parallels are undeniable. Donkey Kong and his sidekick Pauline (who, this time, he has only “sort of” kidnapped), stumble upon a world of food, and its centerpiece is a giant hamburger made of bread, lettuce, tomato, and of course, MEAT.

PATTY PUNCHING

For those who haven’t played it, the game involves a lot of smashing and tunneling through dirt, rock, snow, and later, purely fictional substances like floating rainbow rocks. This burger sits somewhere between the two categories. It’s both based in reality, but it’s tactile response to being punched by a giant gorilla is beyond anything you will ever see in real life. And that’s not just because you have never seen a giant gorilla punch through an even more giant leaf of lettuce in real life. It’s because the lettuce molds and collapses around punches like a strange green clay and not a leafy vegetable. But it does so with such conviction and confidence that, for a second, the player wants to believe that the lettuce is correct, and it is they who are wrong for doubting it.

When punching through the patties themselves, the brown glistens with a greasy wetness that might make your mouth water and stimulate your gag reflex at the same time. This massive structure of meat is the alpha and omega of human digestive instinct, sparking the urge to both fill your belly and expel all of its contents at the same time. Stacked high into the sky, silhouetted against the idyllic horizon of Donkey Kong’s endless summer environment, it is a monument to our endless hunger for content, a natural urge exaggerated to the point of perversion.

BURGER BUSTER

But the burger is not enough. In order to make his way beyond this “Feast Layer” and on to the game’s final areas. Donkey Kong must explore an amusement park made of giant junk food, like giant fried cheese, giant fried snacks, and giant fryolators, in order to punch buttons that automatically cause even more meat, tomatoes and lettuce to fall on the burger, eventually bringing it to four times its original size. It’s here that the BurgerTime parallels are undeniable. It’s easy to imagine that those giant burgers from 1982 falling through the walls of space and “time” only to splat a hard landing in this potential GOTY contender for 2025. If that ends up being a canon explanation for these burger origins, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing about either of these games.

Oh, and I didn’t manage to organically slip in the audacity of the optional burger-themed tie that Donkey Kong can buy in the stage in exchange for a fossil in the shape of an old-fashioned tube TV, the very same kind that we played home console ports of BurgerTime on back in the 1980s. This tie gives the gorilla the ability to actually eat and digest the burger, in order to replenish health. Without the tie, he can only consume apples and melons. No bananas, ironically. And no meat either, until the tie brings out his inner carnivorous instincts, making his burger playground an infinite meal of bizarre, heart-filling, artery clogging pleasure.

BURGER WOMB

Growing up, “womb” levels were, for some reason, big in a lot of games. Magician Lord on the Neo Geo, one or more of IREM’s R-Type games, and maybe most powerfully, Jedah’s stage in Darkstalkers 3, all offered up heaving helpings of red, pulsating, intrauterine tissue for players to battle in. Why was the womb a hot spot gaming backdrop in the ’80s and ’90s? No one knows for sure, but my guess is because it was just artistically sound enough to be visually impressive, unsettling enough to be evocative, but not so disturbing as it would be deemed inappropriate to those who worry about things like “appropriateness”.

In that way, Donkey Kong Bananza’s giant burger is the womb level of a new generation. We can only hope it will usher in a new era of glistening, beef-themed game environments, Long may it shimmer in glory, it’s protein-packed pimple-like blisters and dimples of fried meat standing as a role model for all to see.