We love the classic arcade game Tapper. But we thought the game, like most things we love, would be even better with Bach.

BachBeer Tapper

The Game

If you aren’t familiar with the Bally Midway arcade game Tapper, you can read more about it on the International Arcade Museum website. This classic game casts the player as a bartender who must slide beers down a bar quickly and accurately enough to satisfy approaching customers.

We found an online version of the Tapper game on the website for the simple programming language Scratch. This site encourages visitors to modify existing games, so we decided to replace the Tapper bartender with our website’s namesake, J.S. Bach.

If you have Flash, you can play the game in your browser right now. Once you’ve enabled Flash, just click the green flag in the upper right corner to start the program, and then hit A to begin playing. Read more about the rules below.

The Rules

Press A to start. Move with the arrow keys. Press the space bar to send a beer down the bar. Walk to the money to pick up tips.

The thirsty patrons will keep walking down the bar until they get their fill of beer. Some will be satisfied with one drink; others need more. If a customer reaches the tap, you’ll lose one life and 100 points. If a beer reaches the end of the bar without someone picking it up, you’ll lose a life.

The game is over when you run out of lives or win the game. Get 25,000 points for Level 2 and 100,000 points to win the game.

Acknowledgements

You can look at the code for BachBeer Tapper, and even modify it, here. Feel free to send us any comments or changes by Tweeting at us or using the contact form on this site.

Many thanks to spartans21 at scratch.mit.edu for creating the Root Beer Tapper game we re-mixed for this project, and thanks to pianist Gabriel Antonio Hernandez Romero for his recording of Bach’s Italian Concerto (music licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International license).