March Madness is here, and sports bars nationwide have geared up their satellite dishes and stocked up on suds for college basketball's championship tournaments.
But at Splinter's Sports Club, a lively bar in an otherwise sleepy strip mall here, 48km northwest of downtown Chicago, excitement is brewing over another sporting obsession: Golden Tee video golf.
Golden Tee Fore!, the realistic, 3D simulated golf game, is the most successful coin-operated, arcade-style game since Pac-Man, and maybe of all time, based on revenue from player use, according to its manufacturer. Along with pool tables and dartboards, "Golden Tee" has now become a fixture in American sports bars and pool halls; about 100,000 machines have been installed, including roughly 50,000 that have the newest version of the game's software.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
For the untold millions of weekend enthusiasts, "Golden Tee" is a fun barroom diversion. But some 40,000 registered virtual golfers also vie in an online tournament each month for US$200,000 in prize money. And scores of elite players travel across the country to battle it out in live virtual events for sizable purses.
Like real golf, Golden Tee is won by the player who hits the fewest strokes: a rolling trackball mounted on the game's console controls the simulated golf club. The weather conditions, pin placements and tee distances change daily. Players who feed US$3 into the machine can play 18 holes, with computer-simulated cheering and color commentary by the golf pro Peter Jacobsen of the Professional Golfers Association and the sportscaster Pat Summerall. For an extra dollar, barflies can become video athletes, competing head-to-head in national online tournaments in three prize divisions based on player skill: gold, silver and bronze.
By hooking the machines up to a phone line and connecting it to a server, allowing players to compete online, Golden Tee has revolutionized the way people play coin-operated video games and how they are made. The machines are also installed in about eight foreign countries.
The game has helped its maker grow from a nearly bankrupt start-up in a suburban Chicago basement eight years ago to what is reported to be a US$65 million company. Since it introduced its online version in 1996, the maker of Golden Tee, Incredible Technologies, has awarded more than US$7 million in cash.
Splinter's is popular with some of the best video golfers, and on March 14, it was one of 100 bars nationwide that Incredible Technologies chose to host a party to unveil the latest version of the game, Golden Tee 2004.
The 30-plus "Golden Tee" devotees at Splinter's were thus among the first in the country to play the game's seven courses, The company shipped 19,000 software upgrades -- enough to cover about 80 percent of the locations in the US that have online machines -- three days later.
Since the headquarters of Incredible Technologies are in Arlington Heights, Illinois, only a few miles from Splinter's, several company employees, including the president and chief executive, Elaine Hodgson, were at the party to hand out free T-shirts and baseball hats to the giddy players huddled around the bar's seven machines; as expected, the largest group was gathered around the new game.
Around the world
Golden Tee 2004 features five new 18-hole courses plus two additional amateur courses for beginners. The courses depicted vary, from a Scottish one, "Sword's Pointe," to a Hudson Valley fall-color course, "Heartland Creek," to a lush Caribbean course on St. Lucia, "Tropical Falls." Also notable is the Hawaiian island course equipped with lava hazards. Although the courses are fictitious, the game's designers traveled to the various locales to see real courses and to study wind conditions, terrain and other local environmental factors that are programmed into the games.
"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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