"I just started getting used to the other courses," said Tom Myers, 43, who has played the game regularly for about a year and was navigating the 2004 courses for the first time. "Now I don't even want to play the 2003s."
Another Splinter's regular, Graig Kinzler, 23, is one of the best Golden Tee players in the world. Last November he won the first world championships in Orlando, Florida, taking home a prize of US$15,000.
Money-maker
"The new courses are great, the best ones yet," said Kinzler, who said he made about US$75,000 (in checks, not in quarters) from video golf tournaments last year.
Roughly US$350 million will pass through Golden Tee cash slots this year. Incredible Technologies estimates that the machines updated with the 2004 courses will bring in nearly US$10 million in their first week, a boon for bar owners and vendors, who split the revenues evenly.
Dick Hoyne, who owns 27 Golden Tee machines in suburban Chicago, including all seven machines at Splinter's, smiled between sips of beer as he watched players feed dollar bills into his machines. "If a bar doesn't have a Golden Tee, it isn't really much of a bar," he remarked. "There are some who don't have them; I think they're nuts."
Al MacFarlane, 60, the owner of Splinter's, said that "Golden Tee" has increased his business' earnings by about 25 percent, although he declined to say how much the game brings into the bar.
"People come in here as soon as I open at 11am and stay until we close, seven days a week," MacFarlane said. "I don't remember a game that has taken over the industry as much as this one."
But Golden Tee premiere week got off to a rough start at David Copperfield's House of Beer, a premiere-party bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The CD with the software upgrade was sent to a bar in the meatpacking district by mistake.
"We were getting all these phone calls over the last couple days from regular customers who play the game, and we had to disappoint them," said Bill Reichenbach, the owner of David Copperfield's, which clears about US$350 to US$400 a month on the game. "We would have liked to draw attention to our machine."
Reichenbach said the mistake had been corrected and the bar now has the 2004 game.
The cult of devotees describe Golden Tee as addictive and treat it as a real sport. But the deeper attraction of the game, according to Valerie Cognevich, an editor at the leading coin-op industry publication, Play Meter magazine, is that it is entertaining and easy to play, even for people who do not like video games or golf.
"I'm not a golfer," Cognevich said. "But when I play Golden Tee, I feel like one."
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