Tapper review: four bars, flying mugs, and no time to breathe

Four bars run across the screen, each with a keg at one end and a door at the other. Customers come through the doors and inch toward you. You pull the tap, fill a mug, and send it sliding down the counter. Then you run to the next bar, and the next, and by the second screen you are sprinting.

A juggling act in an apron

The controls are a four-position joystick and a tap handle, and the handle is the heart of the machine. Pull it down and your bartender jumps to the keg and fills a mug. Let go and the mug slides away. It is a satisfying, physical motion, and the game asks you to do it faster and faster.

A customer who catches a full mug gets pushed back toward the door. If he is not pushed all the way out, he drinks, then sends the empty back down the bar at you while walking forward again. So you are serving drinks one direction and catching empties coming the other, on four counters at once.

Three ways to lose

Miss an empty mug and it falls off the end and breaks. Slide a full mug to a bar with nobody to catch it and it flies off the door end and breaks. Let any customer reach your end of the bar and he grabs you and slides you down the counter and out the door. Every one of those mistakes is easy to see coming, which is why the game never feels unfair, only relentless.

Sometimes a customer leaves a tip. Grab it and a group of dancers appears, and some customers stop to watch. It buys you a breath, with a catch: distracted customers cannot catch drinks, so a mug sent their way just crashes.

Tapper takes a job you have watched from the other side of the counter and makes you feel every second of it.

The levels change the crowd: a western saloon with cowboys, a sports bar, a punk rock bar and finally an outer-space bar full of aliens. Between them comes a bonus round where a masked figure shakes cans and shuffles them, and you have to pick the one he did not shake.

What it meant back then

The original Tapper was sponsored by Anheuser-Busch and meant for real bars. The cabinets had a brass rail footrest and drink holders, and early machines even used real Budweiser tap handles as the controller. It was a game you would find in a tavern, not a toy store.

That was a problem for the arcades where American kids actually spent their allowance, because the game was seen as advertising alcohol to minors. So a new version, Root Beer Tapper, was made for arcades, with a soda jerk behind the counter serving root beer. For a lot of us, that is the only Tapper we ever knew, standing in a mall arcade or a pizza place, pulling a tap handle and yelling at a cowboy.

Playing it now

Tapper is still one of the purest tests of multitasking in the arcade. There is nothing to learn but rhythm and priority. Serve the customer closest to the keg first, never throw a mug at an empty bar, and keep an eye out for the empties. It is exhausting in the best way, and you will feel it in your wrist.