Golden Tee Golf - Major Injury Hazard

Thanks to TheWhig.com for their local news report discussing the massive popularity of U.S. arcade game Golden Tee Golf. According to the piece, "Since Golden Tee was released in 1996, at least 100,000 machines have popped up in bars and restaurants across North America." Unsurprisingly, the game developers suggest: "I think you'll find many players who say they're better after three or four beers." But drinking and golfing leads to danger, since the control method is "..a track ball that is half submerged in the machine.. the faster the ball spins, the further the shot flies. Sometimes, eager golfers put a little too much oomph on their drives. The Brass, a popular Golden Tee hangout on Princess Street, has had three players accidentally smash their hands through the video screens on both of the bar's machines."

Comments

New genre of games: Mainstream games

[Krellan]

I played Golden Tee a few times, and found it to be an OK game. It didn't hold my interest. This was even when the machine was on free play, so I could experiment with it as much as I wanted. It just didn't entertain me.

It is clear that Golden Tee is part of a new genre of games, like Deer Hunter, that were often criticized by the gamer community but surprised everybody by how incredibly well they sold. They make money hand over fist. The reason they sell well is because they are targeted to non-gamers.

Golden Tee is often found in bars, not arcades. I've never seen an arcade with a Golden Tee, but I rarely see a bar without one. Like those countertop touchscreen games, it is designed to be played by people who don't often play what we think of as normal games. People who don't really like or use computers that much. In other words, Joe Sixpack.

These games form a new genre: mainstream games. They should be classified as such, and not sports games. Even though they may feature sports content, the target audience is completely different, and the overall feel of the game is completely different from a conventional sports game.

For instance, because it's targeted at people with little or no experience with standard video games, these mainstream games play very slowly and often don't take any action at all unless the player initiates the action. For instance, Golden Tee will just sit there until you roll the trackball.

You probably already have a mainstream game installed on a Windows computer near you: Solitare. My partner's aunt, who hates computers and detests using them, loves to play Solitare in spite of what she normally thinks about computer games. Solitare is clearly reaching its intended audience. I'd consider that a mainstream game!