Restaurant Dash with Gordon Ramsay

~ the last words ~

Restaurant Dash with Gordon Ramsay launched on 27 June 2016 for iOS and Android. It was a spin-off of Diner Dash, the series that more or less invented the time-management casual game, and the hook was that Gordon Ramsay was in it.

You made an avatar chef and served customers against the clock. Progress was counted in Wichelin stars, which is the joke the whole game is named around, and what you earned went into better equipment and better ingredients. New kitchens unlocked as you moved up. Ramsay's voice ran through all of it doing the thing he does on television, with the swearing bleeped.

Reviews were decent. Wired said that hearing the bleeped version of his approval after a clean service was just hilarious. The Irish Times called it a commute distraction that beat another round of Candy Crush, which describes the entire category accurately and is not really an insult.

Restaurant Dash never reached me. Mobile time-management games were not a category I went looking for, and in 2016 the nearest I got to the genre was watching its ads run between levels of something else. What caught me about it, years later and from a long way off, was the designer credit rather than anything inside the game.

~ the record ~

~ the man who drew commander keen ~

Tom Hall was one of the four people who founded id Software. He designed Commander Keen and wrote the Doom design document that the rest of the team largely threw out, then left in 1993. After that came Rise of the Triad at Apogee and Anachronox at Ion Storm, then a long run through studios that kept getting smaller.

He joined PlayFirst in April 2013 as principal designer, which the trade press covered at the time as a curiosity: the id founder goes to the Diner Dash company. Restaurant Dash with Gordon Ramsay, three years after that, is the last game he is credited as having designed.

~ a chef and a license ~

The Ramsay license is the part that dates the game precisely. Through the middle of the 2010s mobile publishers bought celebrity names in volume, and Glu bought more of them than anybody. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood had proved the model in 2014, and Glu spent the years afterward attaching names to templates. Kendall and Kylie arrived in 2016. Ramsay got two of them, this one and Chef Blast in 2020.

The licensed template is also why the ending was so quiet. Electronic Arts bought Glu in 2021, and a catalog title with a celebrity contract attached costs money every year whether or not anyone is still playing it. The sunset notice went up addressed to our loyal community, gave 31 July 2023 for the stores and the purchases closing, and 30 October for the game going offline-only. Nothing in it mentioned Ramsay or Tom Hall.

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