With hunger covered, game designers turned their efforts to thirst, creating Tapper, the only beer-sponsored game ever to make it into the arcades. Budweiser’s logo features prominently on the back wall of each of Tapper’s bars, where the player, as a bartender straight out of a Prohibition-era speakeasy, serves cold ones to lines of demanding patrons. It’s not all selfless service of your fellow man, though. At the end of each round, the bartender always gulps down a cold one in celebration. The fact that the game’s last level is a bar on an alien spaceship is probably a reflection of his level of inebriation. Tapper was later retrofitted with soda and renamed Root Beer Tapper in response to concerns about advertising alcohol to children. Luckily, they didn’t get rid of the dancing burlesque girls.
- keywords
- robert ashley
- culinary culture
