Put the Beer Back in Tapper!

Oh, to have been an adult in ‘84

I played hockey for a few years when I was a kid. Being from a tiny town without a lot going on meant I played on house teams at the Saginaw Bay Ice Arena in Saginaw, Michigan. Ultimately it didn’t take, but I have fond memories of going to other ice arenas in the area, playing hockey, and then checking out what arcade games said ice arenas had.

After a while, I realized I could cut all the other stuff out entirely and just play video games at home. So I retired from hockey at 14, two years into my career, and began focusing on research for Skitching the Elephant, a newsletter I would start 25 years later. 

Most of the arenas I played in had somewhere between two to five arcade cabinets in their lobbies, an obvious ploy to keep kids busy and separate them from some of their money. I’m sure when the folks at my old stomping ground ordered a cabinet called Hit the Ice, they were certain that the hockey game would’ve been the hot ticket. They were mistaken, however, as it was no match for the three-player Ivan “Iron Man” Stewart’s Off-Road. Maybe the last thing kids wanted was to play video hockey right before or after their actual hockey game. Or maybe Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Off-Road just shreds. I think it’s the latter. 

There wasn’t a truck large enough to hold Ivan Stewart

One day while exploring some foreign venue for the first time, I saw a rare sight: an arcade game I wasn’t familiar with. It’s not that I knew every arcade game in the world, it’s just that the handful to be found at these places rarely offered anything that new or obscure to me. Until that day.

What I discovered was 1984’s Tapper, and in hindsight, it’s no wonder it made such an impression on me. It’s like nothing else before or after it. 

The game itself is fun and frantic, putting players in control of a bartender as he runs around between different parts of his establishment trying to keep all his thirsty customers happy. They inch down the bar towards their bartender, ready to strangle him for a glass of suds if they have to. Only a cold one will make them retreat, and you have to work the whole screen to make sure you keep everything in order. It’s like Missile Command with drunk people. 

The premise and gameplay are great, but that’s not what drew me in initially. What commanded my attention upon first glance was the damn beer tap sticking out of the game where the buttons should be. Holy hell. Years before my stint as a bartender, the first beer I ever poured was in a Budweiser-branded arcade machine. It’s ridiculous and innovative and creative and everything silly that I love about video games. 

“I’ll tell you when I’ve played enough!!”

The loop of Tapper is simple: move around, pour a beer, and slide that bad boy down the bar. Move, pour, slide, repeat. A joystick and a beer tap were all you needed, and the simple controls were perfectly intuitive.

The originality extended to the rest of its cabinet design as well. This thing is a work of art. Wood grain, a brass rail on the bottom, hell, they even had cup holders! The game itself served as sort of a little bar if you wanted it to. It was like an earlier version of Kramer’s coffee table book about coffee tables that turned into a little coffee table. 

This game is bonkos!

Despite the strong impression it made, I played Tapper and promptly forgot all about it for a long time. Years later, I saw it on some retro collection, except now it had been rebranded Root Beer Tapper. Boooo.

I didn’t need research to know what happened—Tapper was just too cool for parents of the ‘80s to handle. So the beer in the game went the way of Joe Camel, Spuds MacKenzie, and every other kid-friendly advertisement that didn’t survive the era.  

Woke had this dog euthanized.

Sure, the gameplay is fundamentally unchanged—you’re just slinging root beers now and the Budweiser branding is no longer everywhere. It’s all just make-believe, so how much difference does it make? When you look at how the game had to be marketed afterward, it clearly made plenty. 

Look how they massacred my Tapper

The game now had to roll with the pretense that these bars were full of punk rockers and rowdy sports fans freaking out over not getting enough soda. It played the same, but the spirit was all different. 

For example, there’s still wood grain on the Root Beer Tapper machines, but it looks and feels like bullshit now. It’s the equivalent of finding some seemingly Irish pub named Flanny O’Connors and then realizing it’s corporately backed and merely pretending to be an authentic dive bar. There’s no brass rail on the updated Root Beer Tapper machines, no cup/ashtray holders, and no soul whatsoever. 

If you see one of these machines, the adult thing to do is tip it over

It’s kind of a minor thing, and really who cares, but I think the next time Tapper gets rounded up and released on some retro collection, they could include the version with beer and no one would notice, let alone freak out.

You could probably get away with a bartending game these days, right?

What’s that? There are several? Damn. Has it gone further than that?

Oh. Oh, you don’t say.

Tapper, like me, turns 40 later this year. I know I’m gonna have a bunch of beers. I think the little men and women inside the video game should enjoy the same privilege. 

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