Beef Drop is a homebrew BurgerTime clone programmed by the late Ken Siders and released through AtariAge in 2005. As far as home ports of Data East‘s classic arcade game go, it’s arguably one of the most authentic.

The platform layouts are similar – if not identical – to the original arcade game, and the gameplay is a close approximation, with excellent attention to detail.

While I would count Beef Drop as a “Modern Retro” remake of BurgerTime, the game is almost twenty years old now (at the time of writing), so pretty much qualifies as “old retro” by itself. The game began life as an April Fools joke on the AtariAge forums, but developed into a real homebrew project afterwards.

Unfortunately the coder responsible for Beef Drop passed away in 2017, although he did leave behind probably the best home computer port of BurgerTime around. Mr. Siders also produced Atari 5200 and Atari 7800 versions of Beef Drop – as well as this Atari 8-bit conversion – and all three versions were produced as cartridges for a limited edition run.

Beef Drop is well worth playing now. That is: if you like BurgerTime, and want to play it on old Atari systems. It’s still available as a cartridge from AtariAge‘s website (see link below).

More: Beef Drop Atari 8-Bit on AtariAge
More: Beef Drop on Moby Games