The new video game DQ Tycoon has Twin Cities pride in the bag: It’s about Edina-based Dairy Queen, it was created by Burnsville-based GameMill Entertainment and it’s being sold by Minneapolis-based Target. Whether it will do well remains to be seen.

The computer title (PCs only) is a time-management game that has players running a Dairy Queen store, which includes mixing up Blizzards, decorating cakes and serving Dilly Bars. They then can manage up to four stores, keeping tabs on workers, income and upgrades.

“Our goal was to create an entertaining game that also embraces the rich history of Dairy Queen and its place within the community,” says Brian Kirkvold, executive producer for GameMill.

John O’Neill, president of North Carolina-based Spark Plug Games, said co-developing the game gave his staff  “a great excuse to visit our local Dairy Queen store for ‘research’ purposes.”

I haven’t seen the game yet, but a review at Gamezebo gives it 2 out of 5 stars (with users giving it a 2 1/2), with this positive comment: 

“DQ Tycoon is a cute idea. Anyone who’s a fan of the store’s treats will enjoy serving Dilly bars, Blizzards and other familiar treats, and the game has a fairly good sense of humor with touches like ‘brain freeze’ moments, a crisis that thapens when a customer eats a treat too fast and you must take them a hot hamburger to bring their temperature back down to normal.”

But it adds:

“However, neither the time management nor the strategy portions of the game are pulled off terribly well. The biggest source of frustration is the employee assistants, who are not only slow moving but pretty dumb as well. Employees move significantly slower than [the main character] Emily does, which means it’s usually faster to just do everything yourself.”

Maybe it’s just me, but that actually sounds like the real work world.

DQ Tycoon is available to download now for $20 at Big Fish Games, where you can also try it free for an hour, see some screen shots and watch a demo video. Or you can buy it at Target starting Friday for the same price. It will also be included in the Scholastic catalog circulated in schools in January.  Sweet. 

(And, for the record, I pilfered the title of this post from the blurb on the game’s cover.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.