Nov 18, 2021
Inside The Arcade: Tapper (1983)
Were you ever dropped off at a video arcade in the 1980s and then handed a roll of quarters?
If this happened to you, you probably belong to a subset of people known as Gen-X. We were the kids and young adults who experienced the video arcade at the height of its popularity. If you liked to play video games, the arcade is where you went. Because for the most part, it was the most exciting and only game in town.
If you were lucky enough to have a bankroll like the one above, you walked into the arcade with an overwhelming sense of freedom and possibility. What you had in your pocket was 40 chances at glory, 40 opportunities to pit yourself against a machine in the pursuit of mindless fun. And looking around at 100 or so consoles, the only question was, where to start.
In this series I’m going to walk around the arcade that lives in my memory. I’m going to tell you where I dropped my quarters and why. And I’ll talk about games that delighted me, challenged me and even a few I came to dominate (I’m looking at you “Galaga”). Let’s grab the joystick, tap the fire button and talk about what happened. You ready? Cool, walk with me.
Tapper (aka “Root Beer Tapper”) was not the kind of game you’d find at a boutique arcade (the small collections of consoles that would pop up at a laundromat, bowling alley or movie theater). It just wasn’t popular enough and probably wouldn’t have generated that much play in those small settings. But if you happened upon a larger arcade, there was a good chance Tapper was somewhere in the building. When I saw it, at some point, it would be game on.
Tapper remains one of the most memorable and recognizable games from this time period. It wasn’t that great a game, but it was so delightfully strange and different that it’s hard to forget. When I envision the pitch meeting at Midway before Tapper was put into production, I imagine a scene akin to Jerry and George pitching their sitcom to the NBC executives. In essence, this game was about nothing. A designer must have stood up in the Midway board room and said, “Hey, I have an idea for a game. The player is a root beer bartender. Their task is to serve a group of angry customers across four long tables. If they serve enough Root Beer before any glasses break or the angry customers overrun the bar. They win!”
Somebody said yes to that. And I’m so glad they did. Because I got to play that ridiculous game, and now I can look back on it fondly. But here’s one thing you might not know or remember: This game was hard.
The joysticks were sensitive and not that responsive. To serve a root beer you not only had to be in the right place, you then had to move the serving stick up and down in the right manner to eventually fire the mug down the table. This could take some time, and if during the process you got jammed up by the flimsy joysticks, it could take even longer. And one thing you didn’t have in this game was time, in fact it was a race against it. Because while you were tending to one customer, empty glasses and angry customers would be advancing toward the end of tables all over the map. I could clear the 1st and sometimes even the 2nd round in this game. But as the scene became more hectic and moved faster, I’d get smoked and the game would be over pretty quickly.
I never met or saw anyone who was really good at this game. (Maybe you were, and if so I’d love to hear how you did it.) But I also never walked into an arcade that had Tapper without dropping at least one or two quarters into the console before leaving.
