At first glance Hot Dog King sounds like a pretty straightforward title; you are the owner of a brand new chain of fast food restaurants in one of three fairly major cities, and on your way to becoming the top dog of fast food in the area you must carefully manage who you hire to staff your stores, how much inventory they have, and how happy your patrons are. Of course, you also have to worry about throwing dinner plates at armed robbers, beating mice with soup ladles, fighting a virus off on your PDA Space Invaders style, and thwarting the occasional alien invasion. Even with the both frequent and complete departures from reality that most titles in the genre occupy if not strictly adhere to, Hot Dog King, despite its cornball title, makes it work and is overall a surprisingly entertaining game.

One of the first things you do in Hot Dog King is choose a city to start your franchise in, with the three choices being New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle. While the latter is the easiest city to get a foothold in the first two are easily where the most profits are made and setting up shop in either of them is usually only advisable after having a pretty good foundation in the much more manageable city of Seattle. Each city is split up into six districts that you can place your first store in such as Residential, City Center, Harbors, Industrial, Commercial, and other types of zoning.

The districts themselves have distinct differences. For instance, the price of simply purchasing a store is much higher in the City Center than if you were to purchase a store in an industrial zone. People in one zone may have different expectations of the staff, food selection, or price than people in another zone as well, making the success of your store in a zone more than a little in respect towards how well you pay attention to the wants and needs of the customers in that district.

Once you've purchased your lowly, rank one store the first thing you should do is outfit it, as a new store has no cooking facilities. A rank one store can only purchase a cooler and a microwave to serve up only the most basic pre-prepared meals while the highest rank store at rank five can have a full-fledged kitchen and be able to make anything from in-house burgers to steaks. Each rank has a certain progression towards it, rank two unlocks additional cooking objects to enable you to expand your menu, rank three unlocks a small kitchen to expand it even more, rank four unlocks the ability to hire a maintainable worker to take care of cleaning and repair duties, and the almighty rank five transforms your fast food restaurant into a classy dining environment.

Once you have the ability to cook meals you must then visit the food wholesaler to pick up all of the necessary ingredients. To make a simple burger alls you need is to purchase a stock of the prepackaged ones, but to fit the requirements to be able to sell a burger meal deal you must have a burger, a can of soda, and a chocolate bar. As you rank your store up the menu selections can get a little more complicated, such as how ice cream and sandwich ingredients are used in quite a few different menu items. To aid in this you can use the inventory screen to see how many of each type of meal you have left to sell, and if you see that a particular menu item is low in the things that it needs to make it you can purchase them individually. To help in ordering daily orders at each of your stores can be set up so that at the start of each day whatever items you add to the list are purchased automatically, thus restocking the store for the most part.

Finally to get your restaurant off the ground you must hire someone to work behind the counter. A rank one store only needs one person to run the whole store, while at rank five your store will need two people at the counters, a cook, and a maintenance worker to be effective. The people who work at the counter are considered Franchise staff, while the people who work in the other two positions are considered General staff. While the general staff are fairly straightforward as they are made up of pretty much anyone all of the franchise staff members that you can hire are young, attractive women.