The Joystick Jones
Interactive Games Can Be Destination Attractions 

It's a long held principal among bar owners that gaming machines turn an easy, low maintenance profit. They can help the bottom line and create extra cash here and there.
    For many years, most of the bar room games were standard fare, and players were drawn to the bar, not the game. That’s changing more and more with the evolution of interactive gaming. Companies are advancing the bar room gaming industry at light speed.

Tee for More Than Two
    Incredible Technologies is a name that should be familiar to bar owners. The Illinois-based company is responsible for games like Golden Tee and Silver Strike. For a long time these games were stand-alones that hooked into a phone line and updated player standings infrequently. But that has changed with a new generation of machines.
    “These new machines are unlike anything else,”  says Gary Colabuono, marketing director for Incredible Technologies. “These will get gamers out of the house and into the bar.”
    The draw? The new generations of Golden Tee and Silver Strike are fully interactive.
    “These games pit gamers against 49 other players around the world in a live tournament, “Colabuono says. They rank the players instantaneously based on performance. It used to take 48 hours for the tournament rankings to come back, but now it’s just a few seconds.”
    Golden Tee Live and Silver Strike Bowlers Club are the first wave in a new era of gaming. Because they are fully interactive and live (think Xbox-Live) it opens a whole new world of possibilities.
    “We give away $3,000 every week and trips to the World Series once a year,” Colabuono says. “This year we are adding a trip to the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras as prizes to the tournament winners. All a player has to do to enter is swipe his or her players card or a credit card, just for identification, much like an online kiosk in the airport.
    “The old versions aren’t fully interactive and won’t give players access to the prize tournaments. Players have demanded these machines, and they will go to places that have them.”

The Thrill of the Hunt
    Sega, the videogame system pioneer that many of your patrons grew up with, has been hard at work advancing its bar-based coin-op games.
    Its amusement division, which has a long history of successful hunting games, has developed a gamed called Extreme Hunting 2: Tournament Edition that will function on the same level as the Golden Tee Tournament Edition game.
    “Players tap into an online platform, ALL.Net, that keeps track of their scores and ranks them online in a tournament-style competition” says Ben Kadish, director of technology for Sega Amusements USA. While players won’t be hunting against one another, they will be graded based upon their individual performance and placed according to their scores. This game is an upgraded version of the long line of Sammy hunting games, which were recently acquired by Sega in a merger.
    There’s more on the horizon, Kadish says.
    “Tournaments made possible by this platform will increase revenue for bar owners,” Kadish says. “In Japan, 50,000 games are online from 2,600 locations with nine titles. There is so much potential here that we are just beginning to tap into.
    “We want to create a player community around these games. We have a number of games under development for the network. There will be something for everyone.”