Tempest. Tapper. Rampage. Popeye. Dig Dug. Those are my five favorite classic arcade games, and I’m really not sure what order I’d rank them in. Tempest would probably come out on top–but Tapper would have a shot, too.
Tapper debuted in 1983 and existed in two versions. In one, you played the part of a bartender who served Budweiser beer, in an early example of product placement in games. The other edition was Root Beer Tapper–shown above–in which you were a soda jerk serving non-alcoholic refreshments. The gameplay was identical: You ran around tapping beverages and flinging them down counters at hordes of impatient customers in various settings. It was twitchy good fun, the graphics and sound were excellent for their day, and I know that the game has held up well–I played it, repeatedly, just a few months ago at the amazing California Extreme arcade mega-event.
And now there’s Tapper World Tour, a new version for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad from Warner Bros. and Square One. You may not be surprised to learn that the graphics are more ambitious this time around, and you serve drinks in a lot more settings. But the basic drink-flinging gameplay looks like it’s come into the modern era intact, as it should:
Lovers of 1980s gaming have another reason to be interested in this revival: Its graphics were designed by Don Bluth, whose animation studio produced the animation for Dragon’s Lair (1983) and Space Ace (1984), two games which used laserdiscs to provide astoundingly rich animation and audio for their era.
Interested in playing the new Tapper? It’s scheduled to show up on the iOS App Store in early spring. And courtesy of Warner Bros. and Square One, you have a chance at a free copy–and an 8GB iPod Touch to play it on. We’ll be giving an iPod Touch with Tapper World Tour preinstalled to one lucky winner.
About twenty years after I attended my first 
[NOTE: Here’s a story from our most recent Technologizer’s T-Week newsletter–
