Tappers Arcade Bar: The Quest of Turning a Craft Beer Bar Fantasy into an Indianapolis Reality

By Adam Schick of Indiana On Tap

Picture, in your mind, the video game arcade: a neon-hued relic of the 1980s and early 90s, the local depository of quarters intended for that week’s school lunches, where a town’s youth would gather in droves to blast asteroids, rescue girlfriends from barrel-throwing gorillas, and to defeat evil emperors, sorcerers, and ninjas in martial arts tournaments. For merely $.25 a person could enter the world of Springfield and play as a member of the Simpson family trying to save Maggie from the clutches of Mr. Burns and Waylon Smithers, serve up virtual beers to virtual patrons in “Tapper,” or chomp down on “pac-dots” while dodging ghosts as a… well… I’m not too sure what Pac Man is exactly.

Long gone, though, are many of the arcades we grew up in, along with the games that lit those halls of joy and escape. What hasn’t ended up in the hands of collectors or rarely-visited corners in movie theatre lobbies most likely found home in scrap yards or forgotten warehouses.

A few Indianapolis arcade enthusiasts, however, are attempting an arcade game renaissance of sorts, while shaking up the Circle City bar scene.

And they’re making the games free to play.

With the help of a crowdfunded campaign through Indiegogo, Indianapolis natives Jeff Moulton, Austin Howard, and Aaron Miller are working towards opening up Tappers, Indy’s first arcade bar – a video game arcade with free games and local Indiana beers on tap for its patrons.

After collecting and refurbishing arcade games for years, Moulton was inspired after a visit to Headquarters Beercade, a popular “barcade” with two Chicago locations, and began to plot out how he could bring that same experience to Indianapolis. After meeting Howard, a homebrewer, and Miller, also fan of arcade games, the three began to bounce around the idea of Tappers, envisioning a finished product that would be one of a kind in Indianapolis.

“Over the last year, we’ve travelled to Vegas, Los Angeles, Chicago, Columbus, Lexington, and around the East Coast, visiting different arcade bars and trying to figure out what is working,” Moulton says. During that year, they’ve paid close attention to detail on everything from the quality of the games available to the themes of the bars and the drinks served.

“It was most important to us that if we were going to do this and be successful at it,” Howard says, “that we had to do it right from the beginning.”

That meant not only having games that were arcade favorite decades ago, but also making sure they were in better-than-good condition. For Moulton and Miller, that meant travelling across the Midwest looking at and buying games, and even having cabinets shipped from Canada, along with spending hours of work, on top of their existing full-time jobs, repairing and cleaning up these machines.

“We need to get people in front of these games to remind them of the experience” of the childhood arcade, says Moulton. And putting out a substandard product will only keep patrons away. 

Building a base of regulars also led to the decision of going coin-free.

“We want people to stay and hang out and play these games over and over” Miller says, “and they won’t be inclined to do that if they have to worry about running out of quarters. Plus it’s super frustrating trying to beat a game and not having $.25 handy for extra turns!”  

For Howard, getting people to keep coming back will also mean having great Indiana  beers on tap. When he first began homebrewing, Howard simply wanted to learn the process of what made good beer taste good. From there, a job at a local taproom helped Howard build personal relationships in the Indianapolis brewing community, relationships that have now helped the Tappers campaign gain needed support. 

That support has manifested itself in different forms, from breweries providing wall space for Tappers fliers, granting physical space for the team to bring in some of their games while demonstrating to patrons the experience of a bar arcade, to simply just providing them with personal insight into what it takes to run a successful and popular bar.

“The local breweries have been very supportive,” Howard says, also noting that they’ve had local companies offer their help with Tappers’ marketing and branding. 

“We want them involved, because you have to have good beer to have a good bar. We’re going to build bar that would stand on its own even without these awesome games.”

Aesthetically speaking, Moulton et al. hope to inject whatever space they purchase with a retro video game arcade feeling. They envision neon lighting, posters advertising older games and films, and music and television from the 80s and early 90s. Moulton also notes that they plan on having a few televisions playing Colts games. 

On November 8th, they will bring a few pinball machines to La Margarita in Fountain Square in celebration of the Fountain Square Pinball Expo. 

And on November 16th, they are partnering with Flat 12 Bierwerks to hold a 10-man Bomberman contest, with the matches projected for the crowd to watch. 

They’re most heavily advertising Hops of the Dead, their October 31st Halloween party at Indiana City Brewing. Along with bringing at least 30 different games, from 7:00 PM – midnight the group will also be hosting a game/pop-culture costume contest along with several game tournaments in the taproom and brewery space, with food provided by local food trucks and entertainment from a DJ. 

Howard says the intent is to shed light on their campaign in hopes of garnering more financial support, while “showing people how truly awesome drinking good beer and playing these great free games can be.”

The Indiegogo campaign runs through November 26th, with plenty of other perks available for those who choose to support the Tappers dream. You can donate to the campaign here and stay up to date on its progress and, can hopefully, with your support, make Tappers a new and exciting addition to the Indianapolis community. 

Residing in Indianapolis, IN, Adam Schick is a News & Event Correspondent for Indiana On Tap. You can contact him at aschick11@gmail.com.