Tag Archives | Tapper

Our Tapper World Tour/iPod Touch Giveaway: The Results

Thanks to everyone who entered our drawing for the new Tapper World Tour game and an iPod Touch to play it on. And congratulations to John Erickson, whose name came up when our random-number generator had done its magic.

Speaking of Tapper, I had fun last week meeting Don Bluth and his longtime artistic associate Gary Goldman, the creators of Tapper’s visuals and the animation for two iconic 1980s arcade games: Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. (That’s Bluth and Goldman in the photo above.) I wrote about Bluth’s take on his videogame work over at Techland.

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Win Tapper World Tour–and an iPod Touch to Play It on

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.

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