Amazing post, I loved this game as a kid.

Interesting that the Pizza scoring rules are that simple. I remember that the in-game encyclopedia said something that kids and teens prefer big portion sizes. This led me to always create a Pizza that just had an entire fried chicken on it, as it was easy to reproduce, made a lot of money (big ingredient costs = big margins), and gave good ratings.

And I definitely noticed that Pizzas covered with an even tomato sauce did better than blank ones, probably from the symmetry rules. I just assumed it was hardcoded that people do not like naked pizza.

Interesting note for the translation: The game is German and they went deeply into the whimsy, e.g. most of the demographic groups had funny and very colloquial names. It seems they translated "Grufties" with "Goths". Which makes sense considering the real meaning of Grufti in German (members of the Goth subculture), but in the game the term was actually used as funny way to refer to old senior people (people almost in a "Gruft" = "crypt"). So it's obviously a mistranslation, pulling the word straight from the dictionary. Maybe "Cryptid" would have been more fitting. :D

> I picked it out of a lineup of discounted games in a mall and it hasn't left my psyche ever since.

This is how I found most of my favorite PC games as well, including this one.

Often there were these vertical mesh cylinders with a very low effort sign stuck in them that just read the price and that was it. You had to dig through layers upon layers of arbitrary games and surprisingly often found real gems.

It was an eye-opener for tween me to realize that some of the best games made in that era were about as popular as some of the worst games from the same era.

Thank you for the article, a really fascinating read! Good start to my morning.