Cooking Mama

Cooking Mama was developed by the Japanese studio Office Create and published by Taito in Japan in March 2006, with Majesco bringing it to North America that September and 505 Games covering Europe by December. The concept was a perfect match for the Nintendo DS touchscreen: cooking broken down into rapid-fire stylus minigames — drawing quick parallel lines to chop vegetables, slicing meat, flipping food in the pan with a flick, arranging the finished dish on the plate — some of them rhythm games in miniature.

Presiding over it all was Mama herself, the apron-clad hostess whose reactions became the whole personality of the series. Nail a dish and she beamed; botch one and she glared with flames erupting from her eyes while delivering the line every player can still hear: "Don't worry, Mama will fix it!"

Critics shrugged — the DS original sat at a middling 67 on Metacritic — but it didn't matter. The game sold more than 500,000 copies in the U.S. within its first year and over a million across PAL territories, riding the same casual wave that made the DS a console for everyone, and the franchise had moved more than 12 million copies worldwide by 2011. Sequels arrived almost annually: Cooking Mama 2 on DS in 2007, the Wii spin-off Cooking Mama: Cook Off the same year, and Gardening Mama in 2009.

For a certain cohort of 2000s kids, Cooking Mama was the game that lived in the DS of everyone who "didn't play video games" — and proof that the DS touchscreen could turn anything, even dinner prep, into something everybody wanted a turn at.