The Burger Guy Story ▸ The Greatest Sonic Character?!

sonic adventure is a game i've got a real soft spot for and one thing i've always loved about the game is the non-playable characters if you take the time to actually talk to some of them throughout the game you'll find they have some pretty interesting stories of their own that progress as you make progress through the main story mode they're really fun to keep up with and keep track of and they make the hub world particularly station square feel really alive for example there's a guy who runs an antique store that has a couple of those old metal robot toys i love those he's quite a portly gentleman with a receding hairline and a prominent mustache a good-looking chap there's another npc who looks just like him actually who stands just around the corner he guards a doorway and he's always moaning kind of weird that they look exactly the same obviously it's due to developer constraints but i wonder if they're twins or something like that one npc might surprise people more than others stood frozen outside of the burger shop is an npc that looks exactly like the antique guy and the doorway guy with an old-fashioned brown suit and mustache try to talk to him and he'll actually pick him up instead turns out this isn't an npc at all but a statue stood outside the burger restaurant a kind of restaurant mascot like ronald mcdonald colonel sanders or jollibee if you're filipino kind of cute right it adds a little bit of character to station square if you ask me great so there's a statue of a guy outside the burger shop so what there is it turns out a surprising amount of things to say about this statue who all hereby dub burger guy in station square there's also a little girl that wanders around who's positively obsessed with the statue no matter what happens to be going on in the main story she's always ready to share some burger shop lore with the player doesn't matter if station squares being attacked by chaos or dr eggman or whatever she's got burger guy on the mind if you choose to talk to her most of the time she'll open up by claiming or feigning surprise that the person standing outside the burger shop is just a statue she also says that she hears the statue goes on trips which is a little spooky she says she thinks it looks real which is fair considering it looks exactly like two npcs she tells us he's a major player in the burger business so he's kind of a colonel sanders type figure she tells us the statue guy came up with the burgers secret recipe she rightfully says it had scared the stuffing out of her at night which is a fair assessment some of those fast food statues can be a bit freaky there's two bits of dialogue of special importance though if you talk to her at the end of the game in supersonic's portion she'll start reciting a tv commercial associated with the burger chain to sonic she really is obsessed if you speak to her as big the cat she warns you don't even think of throwing it into the river hmm a rather ominous warning from all of this information from this rather unusual girl it's obvious that the statue is based on colonel sanders of kfc fame which is kind of funny because a mock kfc restaurant also appeared in old sega game dynamite ducks it seems sega have a bit of a kfc obsession these 16 secret spices is a pretty obvious reference to the supposed 11 secret herbs and spices that goes into the colonel's secret recipe but the girl's warning not to throw the statue into the river actually has quite an extensive backstory and it's a reference to a unique little bit of modern japanese folklore known as the curse of the colonel the curse if you've not heard it before has a fascinating backstory here goes on october 16th 1985 the hanshin tigers a kansai based japanese baseball team capped off a magical season with a victory over the yakult swallows in tokyo securing them first place in the central league for the first time in 21 years a group of ecstatic and presumably drunken fans in central osaka celebrated by the dotembori canal singing a song that celebrated the contribution of each player for some bizarre reason fans who resembled each player would dive into the canal during the song perhaps the star tigers player at the time was an american player called randy bass the old japanese crowd had a problem none of them looked like randy bass in lieu of a doppelganger fan to jump into the canal on his behalf the crowd raided a local kfc restaurant stole the colonel sanders statue from outside and threw it into the river as a representation of bass the tigers would actually go on to win the japan series two weeks after the sanders incident on november 2nd so the supposed curse didn't kick in immediately but subsequent years would see the tigers enter something of a tailspin they'd spend the next 18 years near the bottom of the central league standings while many star players would suffer injuries retire or leave the team before the 80s were over apparently the story of the colonel's curse is widely believed to have been started by late night tv show night scoop the show was based around the idea that viewers would send in requests for mysteries that they wanted to see the show solve the show's first request was to recover the drowned colonel sanders statue from the canal apparently they tried and failed multiple times to rescue the statue from the depths of the canal in 1988. the hosts subsequently declared until the colonel is rescued and cleansed of the sludge hanshin have no hope of winning the championship 20 years later in 2009 during annual cleaning of the canal the sanders statue was found and rescued the statue enjoyed a ceremonial cleansing at a shrine and has spent the last decade in a variety of locations first being stationed outside a restaurant near koshien stadium then at kfc's tokyo hq and recently in kfc's osaka offices for what it's worth the curse appears to still be in effect the tigers won the central league pennant again in 2003 but have yet to win another japan series championship despite the restoration of the statue of course sonic adventure was originally released in 1998 in japan in the midst of the tigers abysmal streak so the curse of the kernel was very much in effect at that point in time if you ask me sonic's crew should follow the little girl's advice and not throw burger guy into any bodies of water this is just one of the many little subtle things that make their way into sonic games that add a lot of flavor to the world burger guy isn't just fascinating because of this curse business he's also a beacon for glitches too he's genuinely so much fun to play around with try throwing him around and see what happens you might put michael jordan to shame check this one out try your best to ignore the little girl's wishes and fling him into the sea and wait a minute where's he gone oh there he is and he's back no idea what happened there i even threw him into the air quite far away from the shore and he magically appeared there still it actually took me a while to notice this one burger guy has a tendency to disappear into the void because it's pretty easy to push him through walls and invisible boundaries and make him clip out of bounds try to plop him down in his own restaurant and he'll disappear out of existence and end up right back outside the restaurant try to put him down near the wrong wall and he'll slide into another dimension burger guy can also rather handily be used to access levels that you're not supposed to be able to reach i was able to prop him up outside the entrance to twinkle park forcing him to push me through the wall it didn't do me much good i enjoyed messing around with the statue and seeing where i could get it but i personally couldn't get anywhere useful with it but the folks over at the d-pad gamer have a glitch video that shows just how exploitable the statue really is they affectionately name him mr bobsworth i recommend you check out their video a couple of the more well-known statue exploits involve knuckles accessing emerald coast and sonic getting the light speed shoes upgrade early by using the statue to clip into the manhole cover that's blocked by a car there's one glitch i noticed when playing on my gamecube version of sonic adventure dx if you head to the burger guy early on in the game by clipping through the police barricade that usually blocks this area off go and grab burger guy walk him off screen and then back on and head to the burger shop and voila you've now got yourself two i love the idea that the staff at the restaurant have a second statue handy just in case the first one goes missing what you might not know is that sonic adventure was originally released in japan first in 1998. by the time the game arrived in north america and elsewhere some issues had been patched and changes had been made this second release has subsequently been dubbed sonic adventure international in the japanese release it's possible to jump on burger man which is pretty fun and increases his glitchy potential here's another difference that burger man has in the japanese version in later releases when a character places burger guy down they place the statue in front of them while standing in place which often makes burger guy clip through elements in the stage in the sonic adventure japanese incarnation the opposite is true when burger guy is placed he stays in place and characters are pushed backwards these two elements burger guy pushing characters back and being climbable makes it even easier for players to clip through a massive amount of environments and enter levels that they're not supposed to when playing around on the japanese dreamcast game i also noticed that cars can drive right through burger guy's ghostly visage all of this clipping and glitching and stuff like that is possible in later releases of course but i just think it's funny that some attempts were made to fix burger guy early on but he's still remained a lightning rod for glitchy behavior in every other version of the game too now returning to sonic adventure dx the remixed version of sonic adventure that first released in 2003 dx has a mission mode where the player is tasked with finding missions scattered throughout the play fields and zones and has to complete as many as possible the burger guide crops up in four different missions sonic's very first mission brief reads bring the man who is standing in front of the hamburger shop which is fairly straightforward all you have to do is go to the burger shop grab burger guy bring him to the center of station square and there you go sonic has another mission that can be found in the egg carrier it reads fighter aircraft are flying everywhere somebody get me out of here if you enter skydeck zone you'll see burger guy at the start of act two and you have to safely guide him through an area filled with projectiles and gale force winds it's actually a huge pain in the ass and a fairly difficult mission to complete it also begs a lot of questions who on earth put this guy up here and how is this non-sentient statue asking for help it's all very bizarre i've always chalked it up to just being a dr eggman prank e 102 gamma has a mission involving burger guy too the brief reads lonely metal sonic needs a friend look carefully all you have to do is pop the statue which is downstairs next to the metal sonic that hangs out in a stasis tube curious but what a dream team metal sonic and burger guy the final burger guy mission is undertaken by amy the mission reads he's going to drown help the man in the water it's self-explanatory all you have to do is retrieve him from the pond in the mystic ruins area but i like how this mission is another call back to the curse of the colonel again i can imagine the little girl wrote this mission description and got mixed up as to whether this statue is just a statue or an actual guy drowning that's a lot of info but ultimately that's all there is to say about burger guy officially he's a throwaway character if he's even a character at all and hasn't appeared outside of sonic adventure as is often the case though burger guy's popularity has ascended in recent years thanks to the sonic fanbase if you want even more ways to play with burger guy here's a few in 2020 burger guy got added to gary's mod because why not i guess if you want to fight an army of burger guys armed with cattle prods well now you can if you're more of a sonic guy then at the tail end of last year the excellent and creative chow mix who you should also check out if you haven't already unleashed on the world of mod the added burger guy to sonic adventure 2 complete with naruto run and the cute little icon for burger guy the mod aptly named burger man adventure was a big enough deal to get reported on by a few gaming news outlets thanks for upping the ante and sharing burger guy with the world if you've ever wanted to see burger guy and shadow the hedgehog exchange heated words this mod is for you at around the same time one of the internet's foremost experts on sonic adventure that's speeps released a meme maker mod for sonic adventure a pretty hulking mod that adds a lot of different stuff including the ability to play as npcs which of course includes burger guy so if you really want to that's both sonic adventure games that you can complete as burger guy speeps deserves a special thanks for also bringing the menace of the burger guy to the attention of the sonic the hedgehog twitter account as well ultimately what's surprising to me is the lack of creepypasta i mean people love to make stuff about tails doll and other characters but who could be creepier than this weird supernatural statue with the power to potentially curse people he seems primed for some lo-fi horror game or five nights at freddy's clone anyone want to take up the baton and make that before we finish we may as well cover a few other bits about the burger restaurant there's a fella who works there and a girl who has a crush on him you can follow their side story as the main story progresses the girl will stand around awkwardly outside or inside the restaurant acting all shy and scared to talk to him much to the frustration of the fella who works there eventually she ends up getting a job and working at the burger joint too the guy's happy about this of course but kinda wishes you'd given him a heads up about her feelings towards him the diner also has a weird poster on the wall that's always fascinated me if you look closely it resembles a character of sorts for a long time fans have assumed that this is a prototype for rouge the bat on the other hand for the past few years i've claimed that it's actually the best sonic original character of all time plump dankenstein mcfluent and the cat esquire because the resemblance is uncanny it turns out though that this is a scrapped design for a spider character as confirmed on twitter by former sega designer satoshi okano here's a rather interesting piece of fan art that imagines what the spider character might have looked like and that is just about everything there is to say about burger guy before we finish off i just wanted to share a couple of pieces of fan art of burger guy that i really love thanks for tuning in for some obscure sonic lore as always the floor is open if you have a character you'd love me to talk about in the future feel free to let me know i'm planning a slightly different project in the future too where i reminisce about some of my favorite sonic fan games if you've got a recommendation or a favorite fan game please let me know that too thanks for watching and hopefully i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Johnny Vector

Views: 58,071

Keywords: sonic adventure, sonic adventure glitches, sonic adventure burger man, sonic adventure burger shop statue, burger man, burger guy, burger guy meme, sonic burger, curse of the colonel, sonic adventure glitch, sonic adventure glitches dreamcast, sonic adventure burger shop, sonic adventure NPC, sonic adventure npc dialogue, burgerman, burgerman adventure 2, burgerman adventure, sonic adventure missions, sonic adventure dx

Id: VC1cYrNlJaE

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 24 2022