As a beleaguered bartender, you have to serve drinks to
an endless onslaught of bar patrons, never allowing them to reach the end of the
bar. You must also pick up empty glasses as they slide back toward you, and you
can also grab a tip whenever one briefly appears. Clearing the screen of all
pixellated hardened drinkers takes you to the next screen, and other scenarios,
including outdoor sporting events.
(Bally/Midway, 1983)
Tapper was easily the most controversial game of its time. Originally
conceived as a game which would be sold only to bars, it was also one of
the first video game product placements for something other than a movie (i.e.
Atari's Star Wars and Bally/Midway's own
wildly successful Tron). Midway's marketing
department approached Budweiser about the possibility of sponsoring the game, in
exchange for which the Bud logo would be ubiquitous on the game's artwork and in
its on-screen graphics.
Just one little problem - bars were not the only establishments to buy
Tapper machines. Soon, this Budweiser-sponsored, alcohol-oriented game
was popping up in arcades across the country, where kids could pop in a quarter
and drink it all in (metaphorically speaking). Parents and pressure groups were
not amused. Thus was born the watered-down (no pun intended!) version of the
game for mass consumption, Root Beer Tapper (minus the Bud logos and beer
references, but otherwise unchanged - the game was still set in a
bar.)
For the most part, Tapper machines were converted into Root Beer
Tapper, and very few of the original arcade machines still exist, complete
with beer-swilling artwork and Budweiser branding. For arcade collectors, a
real live, honest-to-God Tapper is a real find.
So, was the outcry necessary? Embarking on a little bit of social commentary
- which I know is not what people come to Phosphor Dot Fossils to read -
I think the protests were justified. The recall of Tapper fits in with
my theory of older-video-games-as-better-video-games because, quite simply, they
were more abstract and more pure escapism. Drinking in a video game ranks right
up there with graphic violence in my book - it isn't necessary, it doesn't make
the game more fun, and in my slightly-holier-than-thou opinion (which is heavily
influenced by my own experiences with friends' and family members' alcohol
consumption), these intrusions of reality on gaming are unwelcome. I wasn't
even a teenager in 1983, when Tapper first appeared, but I was aware of
drinking then, within the context of my own family, and at that time, I sure as
hell didn't want to play a game which revolved around drinking.
Was Tapper/Root Beer Tapper fun? Well, more or less. It's almost too
easy at first, which may fit in with why Nolan Bushnell decided to make a
coin-op out of Pong rather than a complicated
follow-up to Computer Space - Pong would be easier for players in
a bar situation whose reflexes may have already been diminished by a few drinks.
It's a fun game, but its context, to this day, still bugs me.
A version of Root Beer Tapper was planned for
the Atari 2600 but never saw the light of day. This
was most likely due to a combination of the controversy surrounding the arcade
version, as well as the sudden death of the home video game industry in 1983/84,
though a ColecoVision version was released in small
numbers.
Tapper in any form languished in obscurity until the release of the
Midway Collection volume of Arcade's Greatest Hits for the Sony
Playstation, which included a complete emulation of Root Beer Tapper
(though the video interviews and trivia sections of the disc do make frequent
mention of the game's original intentions).
Rating:
Three quarters - worth repeat play, but with some annoying features that
might alienate less patient arcade veterans.
Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster
Three quarters - worth repeat play, but with some annoying features that
might alienate less patient arcade veterans.
