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Weird Weekend

Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.

It’s easy to dismiss videogame recipe books as a frivolous marketing gimmick, and I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. My original plan for this article was to find the most preposterous example of a gaming-themed cookbook, then attempt to recreate the silliest recipe from it. I assumed this would be easy. I mean, nobody could actually write a *good *Sonic-themed cookbook, could they?

Yet when I looked into this odd corner of gaming culture, I noticed two things. First, many of the gaming-themed recipe books you’ll find on Amazon are not only well designed, but they’re also filled with dishes that look like something you would actually want to eat. Second, many of them are written (or co-written) by the same author—Victoria Rosenthal.

Final Fantasy 14 futomaki rolls (Image credit: Insight Editions)

This is not a coincidence. Rosenthal has been writing recipes inspired by videogames for well over a decade, first on her own cooking blog Pixelated Provisions, and later penning official recipe books for a wide range of games. For Rosenthal, gaming is as essential a part of cooking as any other ingredient. Her passion for games is what motivates and inspires her to cook, the thing that sparks her imagination and drives her to experiment with new dishes.

“I’ve been a gamer my entire life. I had an original Nintendo growing up and then from there [made] a big jump to the Nintendo 64,” Rosenthal says. Studying 3D animation in college, Rosenthal’s journey into blending gaming and cooking began when she got a job at NASA in Houston, using AR and VR to assist astronauts in training. “It was for crew and trying to figure out ways to make their life easier,” she says. “I definitely saw a lot of different crew come in, a lot of the younger people, and it was just like ‘Oh you’re gonna go to space one day, that’s cool!’”

Living in Houston meant doing a lot of driving, which Rosenthal, a Chicago native, doesn’t especially enjoy. To avoid driving to restaurants and takeout joints, she began cooking more from home, initially from family recipes. “Then I had friends from college that were like ‘Oh hey, what are you cooking? Can you share some of your recipes?’” she says. “I started a generic blog that was like ‘Here’s this food recipe I made.’”

Guild Wars 2 omnonberry cake (Image credit: Insight Editions)

Rosenthal quickly lost interest in the blog. “I got bored six months in.” A year later, however, the idea returned in a new form, as Rosenthal grew increasingly aware of the presence of food in the games she was playing. “Guild Wars 2 was the one that really kicked me into being like ‘Oh, this is a great idea’ because they break down [the] ingredients you need,” she says. “I could use this as inspiration to start figuring out new recipes I want to make.”

It was at this point Rosenthal started Pixelated Provisions, mainly as a fun way to motivate her cooking. “I still had my full-time job at that time, and I was, on the weekends, kind of having fun, taking pictures, trying to post at least once a week,” she says. “I even trained a lot of my friends [that], if you see food in a videogame, tell me.”

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Over time, the blog began to attract attention, and in 2017 Rosenthal was contacted by the publisher Insight Editions about the prospect of writing a cookbook based on Fallout. She accepted the gig immediately. “I was like ‘Somebody will *pay *me to do this?’”

Horizon Zero Dawn sour fruit tart (Image credit: Insight Editions)

Rosenthal was given a brief to come up with 70 recipes and a runway of two to three months, during which time she had to create, test and refine every recipe, write them up, photograph the dishes, and write the “fluff text” to frame and contextualise each recipe. “I don’t know how old me was able to do [that],” she says. “Now I do the books full time, and it is typically a two-month runway … but then I was doing my full-time job and using my weekends to do this.”

Rosenthal wrote the Fallout cookbook according to the same principles she wrote all subsequent books. As much as possible, the recipes let readers recreate dishes seen in the game or series in question, with ingredients that could plausibly stand-in for their virtual equivalents and remain consistent across recipes. “I had to establish rules for myself,” she says. “If a recipe uses deathclaw, what meat is it always going to be closest to?” she says. “And I was like, okay, deathclaw is always pork.”

More than that, however, Rosenthal wants her book to *feel *like an extension of the games “We like them to feel like they’re actually in the game world,” she says. This might mean including little nuggets of lore to draw in fans of those universes. But they might also be written in the voice of that universe or be designed to look like part of it.

Yakuza Ishin hanamura box (Image credit: Victoria Rosenthal)

The Fallout cookbook, for example, is written as if it was published by Vault-Tec, but with “handwritten” comments and annotations from the Vault Dweller suggesting alternative, wasteland-friendly ingredients. “It would probably make sense that Vault-Tec would write a book, but then a Vault Dweller would find it and make notes to adjust based on what they can find in the world after they’re exploring,” she says.

Writing the Fallout cookbook was very much a learning experience for Rosenthal. This was partly in how to refine certain elements of her recipe creation, like food photography. “I know at one point, I had one of the art people go ‘Let’s make it messier. Don’t be afraid. It’s fine. It’s Fallout. Make it messier.’”

But it was also about learning how to liaise with both a book publisher and a videogame publisher and work with their requests. For example, at the outset of the Fallout project, Rosenthal asked which Fallout games she was allowed to base ideas and recipes on. “They said ‘Not New Vegas,’” she recalls. “I had to make sure not to make any references to New Vegas or pull any recipes from [it].”

Final Fantasy 14 orange cookies (Image credit: Insight Editions)

When Fallout: The Vault Dweller’s Official Cookbook released in 2018, it proved a bigger hit than anyone expected. “I definitely was surprised. These are very specialised books,” Rosenthal says. “I think it’s why I keep getting work from [Insight Editions], because they have been very happy with the recipes I’ve come up with.”

Since then, Rosenthal has written cookbooks for all manner of games, including Destiny, Street Fighter, and yes, Sonic the Hedgehog, Each project comes with its own unique challenges. Some, for example, might involve working with elements from a game that hasn’t been released, as was the case when Rosenthal wrote God of War: The Official Cookbook of the Nine Realms. “This was before the second one came out, where food is mentioned and there’s cooking,” she says. “That was the first project where I was like ‘We need a second lore author to handle this’ because they’re asking me to write stuff that isn’t released yet.”

Other series’ had more food references than Rosenthal expected at the outset, but were harder to create a plausible voice for. One such project was Halo: The Official Cookbook. “There’s a lot of shops that exist in the game. They have menus on them and little descriptions of different foods,” she says. But who on (or, indeed, off) Earth would be writing* *a cookbook in the Halo universe? Rosenthal came up with the idea of a former “corporate food pusher” turned chef inspired by Anthony Bourdain. “I was surprised they let us do [that],” Rosenthal says. “She’s very anti-military, but in line with the workers, highlighting the people in the background.”

Final Fantasy 14 xibruq pibil (Image credit: Insight Editions)

The strangest project Rosenthal has worked on, she says, is My Pokémon Cookbook, primarily because it came with one very specific restriction. “It can’t look like you’re eating a Pokémon,” she says. “I know one [recipe] I pitched was ‘Oh, we could do Sandshrew, but like a concha, like it’s rolled-up.’ And they’re like ‘No, [readers] might think they’re eating Sandshrew.’” In the end, Rosenthal wrote the Pokémon cookbook to feature exclusively vegetarian dishes. “I wanted to make sure it didn’t feel like you were eating the meat of the Pokémon in any capacity.”

Rosenthal has worked on her blog and books full time since 2021, and has two books releasing in 2025. The first of these is Guild Wars 2: Feasts of Tyria, which released in September, taking Rosenthal back to the game that started it all. “I was like ‘Wow, finally, full circle! I can do an official product for them.’” The other is the second volume of Final Fantasy 14-themed recipes, which is due out on October 21.

There are also many games Rosenthal would still love to write a cookbook for “My big pie in the sky one is definitely the Yakuza: Like a Dragon series,” she says. “Another one would be Baldur’s Gate, or honestly anything with Larian Studios. I love their stuff, and I love the food they always have [in their games].”

Baldur’s Gate cinnamon rolls (Image credit: Victoria Rosenthal)

Rosenthal is fully aware of how the concept of a videogame-themed cookbook might seem at a cursory glance, and cautions that browsing Amazon can be a bit of a minefield. “I will admit there are a lot of unofficial ones that are pretty trashy out there, and using AI generated stuff that I look at and I’m like ‘These recipes aren’t real,’” she says.

At the same time, she believes her own work speaks for itself, and has been surprised by how many people who have told her that her books inspired them or people around them to cook. “I’ve gotten many messages from parents saying ‘Oh, you convinced my kid to get in the kitchen and start cooking,’” she says. “That is exactly why I started doing this. It’s just convincing people that the kitchen is not that scary. It might be intimidating, but same as a videogame, as you level up in there, you’re going to get better and more comfortable at it.”

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad’s home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he’s always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he’ll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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