Game 12: Imbiss III (1987)

Germany
Released 1987
Genre: Economy Simulation
Developer: Oliver Schwald
Date Started: 26 June 2025
Date Ended: 26 June 2025
Total Hours: 0.5
Difficulty: 2/5
Final Rating: 22

Another quick review, this time for Imbiss III by Oliver Schwald, a simple German economy simulation game where you run a small snack bar. There is no fixed end state, you simply have to make as much money as possible in the number of weeks you choose at the start of the game. Each round, you can stock up from a fixed selection of goods (fried sausages, french fries, cola, 3 types of ice cream, cigarettes and newspapers) and set as selling price for each item. After accepting, the game simulates a business day, and you can watch your stocks going down and the amount of money in your cash register going up. As the manual notes, people will buy more on the weekend days, while you’ll be only able to buy stock on regular weekdays, so you have to plan ahead. The game also simulated temperature, which affects the sales of ice cream and drinks. If you’re good enough, you can add your name to the high score list at the end of the game.

Programming seems fine for what the game is trying to do. I noticed no bugs, but it’s no technical marvel: 6. The Controls are completely mouse-driven and feel perfectly adequate without annoyances. I like that you can keep buttons pressed to quickly set the price for an item, without having to click each time. 7. There is certain charm to this, even if this feels more like an Excel sheet than a game, mainly because it’s about simple, mundane stuff everyone can relate to: food and drinks on a hot summer day, so Vibe gets a 3 from me. There are no Graphics in a traditional sense, just a very simple, mouse-driven text interface, so I’ll give it a 1. There is no Story, of course, so that’s a 0. There’s no real Audio either, apart from a short melody that plays when you start a new day: 1. I had some good, simple fun with this, so I’ll give it a 4 for Fun. This gives it a final rating of 22. That’s pretty good for such a simple text-based game, but it feels very solid and like a game that was fun to play in short bursts back then.

There’s actually a bit of history attached to Imbiss III. Apparently, it was a port of an earlier version of the game simply called Imbiss the author released in 1984 for the Commodore 64 (whatever happened to Imbiss II), which in turn was based on a 1983 Apple II game called Imbiss-Bude by F. Brall. From there all kinds of ports and remakes to various home computers and later the PC and Android followed. The last version I could find was a PC version from 2021 by GitHub user Steinheilig and is written in Python. It can be found on GitHub, where you also find a bit of historical details about the different versions, as well as infos about historical bugs and, just for the fun of it, how to optimize strategies for the game using machine learning.