Food Poisoning: Hells Kitchen to Be a Videogame!

From Next Generation:

Ludia Inc. hopes you’re hungry because they’re dishing out Hell’s Kitchen games next year on just about every platform possible.

Yes, Hell’s Kitchen, the reality TV show that sets groups of hopeful master chefs into a cooking frenzy under the watchful gaze and frequent verbal abuse of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey is becoming a videogame. Ludia In.c recently announced a multi-year agreement with Granada to turn the Hell’s Kitchen property into a barrage of games across “as many platforms as possible.”

Why this many pronged attack? Well like the episodes of Hell’s Kitchen where contestants have to turn one food item into as many dishes as possible (say squid quesadillas followed by squid kabobs with squid sorbet for desert), Ludia’s plan is to put the game on as many possible platforms in order to get “content to consumers when and where they want it.” That way if you like the squid but aren’t a fan of kabobs, you can always hit the sorbet.

According to Ludia CEO and founder Alex Thabet, the game, which will coincide with the start of the fourth season of the Hell’s Kitchen TV show in 2008, “will bring the fun of the kitchen boot camp experience from the TVs to the PCs and consoles” and will aim to “engage existing and new fans of the show.Oh, and if the game is the full course meal, there’s also a little mint stuffed into your bill with a recipe book feature. This collection of recipes will be some of Chef Ramsay’s “favorite food concoctions” that players will be able to print and try out for themselves.

Soon you too will be able to experience the “trademark intensity” of Ramsay as he agonizes over your carefully crafted culinary creations. Yes criticism and cooking is served.

First things first, I can only imagine this is how a jobs posting reads at Next-Gen.

Always wanted to be a games journalist, but are afraid you don't have the skills? Worry no more! Not only do we not expect you to know your topic, but we don't even ask you to fact-check or edit! You supply the laptop and we'll supply the press-releases for you to copy and paste. Sure, the pay may be low, but so are the expectations. Apply today!

I'm sorry that's a tad snarky, but come on! Anyone who has ever watched five minutes of food tv knows that the squid-based example above (the part that wasn't blatantly xeroxed from the press release) actually describes the show Iron Chef and not Hell's Kitchen. At all. Hell's Kitchen, if anything, is like Survivor. It's two teams competing head-to-head in a split-kitchen, managed by Gordon-Tourettes-Ramsey. The two separate kitchen staffs try to get through a dinner serving with real (aka General Casting) customers, all the while Chef Ramsey tries his hardest to make each of them cry. At the end of the night, one team wins and gets a reward and the other goes out on the patio to chain-smoke and binge-drink while the best-of-the-worst decides who to nominate for elimination. It's actually quite entertaining, if for no other reason than to watch people made fun of on national tv.

Now, how this will translate to a videogame is beyond me. The Cooking Mama games for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii are apparently the cream of the cooking crop and are still saddled with scores in the D- range, if we were assigning letter grades (although I have a young cousin who is apparently using them to help teach his mother how to cook. Go figure?). If I had to fashion a guess based on what I know about games, the Hell's Kitchen show, and the myriad other movie and tv tie-in games, this could possibly end up being one of the worst games to ever be green lighted. The only way I would be remotely interested in even renting this game would be if it came with a montage video of every one of Chef Ramsey's temper tantrums from the tv show. Or, better yet, maybe Chef Ramsey will be guaranteed to be online playing with you at a certain time every week and those who log into the game can be ridiculed and berated by the master, himself! Maybe we can use the Xbox Vision camera to show him what we look like so he can personalize the verbal attacks! Now that would be something, wouldn't it you lazy fat, disgusting, pimply, worthless piece of bleep?