Classic of the Month: Tapper

Manufacturer:	Bally Midway
Developer:	Marvin Glass and Associates
Genre:	Puzzle/Platform
Board:	Unknown
Year:	1983

Video games are awesome and beer is awesome, so surely the combination of the two would be even awesomerer? You'd be bang on with that one and if you really need proof (of what is essentially a universal law) look no further than Bally Midway's Tapper.

The game puts the player in control of a bar tender, who has to supply his demanding and increasingly bizarre-looking patrons with Budweiser (or generic root beer in a later, child friendly version called Root Beer Tapper). Tapper's pub has four bars, each with a door at one end and keg at the other. As the patrons appear you have to move to their bar, draw a pint of beer, then slide it down the bar to them, before they get to the end of the bar. When they catch the glass, they are pushed back a few feet. To finish the level you have to push each patron all the way back through the doors and out of the pub. But it's not as easy as just bombarding them with drinks. If they are still drinking, any subsequent glasses will fall to the floor and when a glass breaks in Tapper, you lose a life (well, a chance). To add more danger to the game, when a patron drains their glass they slide it back to you; fail to catch the glass and there goes another life. So you have to balance serving patrons with catching their empties. If a patron makes their way to the end of the bar, they will grab Tapper and carry him off and out of the pub — for some reason.

So the game has three ways in which the player can lose a life and if that wasn't enough, collecting the tips patrons leave (at various points along any one of the four bars) puts you at more risk of all three of them. So what on the face of it sounds like quite a cute and fun little game soon becomes as challenging and oppressively difficult as any other arcade game of the era. At the end of the day, Tapper wants your 10ps, so don't expect this to be a push over.

Tapper was released in 1983 and I think it's a pretty amazing looking game. The bar tender and patrons are detailed, colourful and brimming over with character — especially in later levels, when setting for the bar changes and the cowboys are replaced with sports fans, then punks and finally aliens (again, I don't know the reason for this). I can't help thinking that the bar tender looks like some distant cousin of Mario, but that's probably just a coincidence. As for the Budweiser tie-in, back then, here in the UK, Budweiser seemed like some exotic Yank beer, which must be refreshing and delicious, since it was always popping up in cool American culture, from action movies to rock videos. It wasn't until about a decade after the release of Tapper did I get to find out for myself that it was actually bland-tasting, overly carbonated piss. Give me a pint of Guinness any day! Tapper's still great though.

Usually, the videos I include in these posts just show someone playing the game on MAME, but every so often I find a video of the machine itself. In the video below you can see that as well as being a classic game, it's a classic cabinet. As well as a tap for a fire button for that authentic bar tender feels, it also has a bar at the bottom, which confusingly is something for patrons, not bar tenders. Oh well, it's a nice touch and a beautiful cabinet.

Root Beer Tapper was available on Xbox Live Arcade for a few years, until Midway went under and Microsoft had to pull all of their games. A nice touch on the Xbox version was the option to flick the right analogue stick down, a la the tap on the original cabinet. But it's gone now and even if you had the trial on your HDD (as I do), you can't buy the full version any more. Bummer.

MTW