CDi Magazine gave Food Dude, then called Skate Dude, a brief mention in its 1993 blurb about Zelda’s Adventure, referring to it as a 10-level game “with attitude” that focused on the player learning “the rules of good nutrition.” This was not your typical, dry edutainment software, though, as the English publication went on to state, “If you continue to eat junk food, you could end up being attacked by aliens, or even die of a heart attack!”
Despite the unusual approach of being killed in an educational game for kids, Scott Kravitz, an animator at Viridis, who worked on the character graphics and animation for Zelda’s Adventure, didn’t think much of the title.
“It was a terrible, terrible game. It used vertical scrolling gameplay, but moved quickly so there was no time to avoid obstacles. The only way to win was to memorize the path, but it wasn’t worth investing the time to do that. I worked with Randy Casey on the game. He would ask me to design weapons and tools, which I had done for Zelda, and drop them in. The soundtrack was some kind of loud guitar music.”
Despite the unusual approach of being killed in an educational game for kids, Scott Kravitz, an animator at Viridis, who worked on the character graphics and animation for Zelda’s Adventure, didn’t think much of the title.
“It was a terrible, terrible game. It used vertical scrolling gameplay, but moved quickly so there was no time to avoid obstacles. The only way to win was to memorize the path, but it wasn’t worth investing the time to do that. I worked with Randy Casey on the game. He would ask me to design weapons and tools, which I had done for Zelda, and drop them in. The soundtrack was some kind of loud guitar music.”
Randy Casey programmed all of Zelda’s Adventure as the lead software engineer, except for the RPG inventory system, which was done by Gavin James, who would later end up working at Naughty Dog. Casey described Food Dude as a simplistic learning tool to teach kids how to eat healthy that suffered from crippling design issues.
“Yeah, you jumped over stuff. The levels weren’t being designed correctly,” Casey said. “The artists were designing flat 2D levels before the gameplay mechanics were figured out. There was no thought put into the distance the player would jump with regards to item placement on the levels.”
“Food Dude. That takes me back,” said Eric Milota, who was another software engineer on Zelda’s Adventure. “That was a scroller game where you were a sprite over a moving background, and we had stuff like bananas/apples/heathy food appear, and if you skated over them, you’d get power-ups. There was also things like ice cream cones and other junk foods that if you skated over them you’d get ‘hit’ and slow down. Then, between levels, there was a static street shown and some full motion video overlaid over the top of your Food Dude kid character talking to you about ‘Earth First, Peace’ and stuff like that. I think Anna Roth was the writer/designer. We did some video shoots in our office that had a teenage-looking actor run some lines in front of a blue screen, and we placed it over a static screen like in a school hallway and whatnot.”
Above: As Viridis did with Zelda' s Adventure, they also made miniature versions of the creatures in Food Dude. Read more about that here.
Milota believed that the idea for Food Dude came from an earlier CD-i project, which was also cancelled, called Stay Healthy for Life: An Interactive Diet.
“I don’t think the project got very far before it was canned,” Casey said. “I just remember getting frustrated at the artists making levels before the gameplay mechanics code was put in. Viridis got a lot of projects without really having much of a clue about game development.”
[Source: Private archive Jason Bakutis and Nintendo Player]