One of my favorite things to read when I was a kid were books that collected the silly laws from bygone eras that were still on the books in different states. You know the routine: In Alabama, it’s a felony to train a bear to wrestle, Delaware prohibits the sale of perfume as a beverage, and firing missiles at birds will send your ass to the big house in Florida. Just your normal, everyday stuff every community has to confront. These are amusing, but what’s funnier than the stupid ones are the unintended consequences of seemingly-rational laws. Well, funnier to read about at least–not so funny if you’re Steven Spielberg trying to open an arcade in Texas back in 1997.

Arcades never had the best reputation to begin with, collecting delinquents, smokers, and outcasts with the gleeful abandon of a corrupt Pokemon trainer, but the 90’s really dropped the hammer. Games like Mortal Kombat and the never-ending spree of me-too kill-a-thons which followed soured parents and politicians alike on public video gaming. Between Indiana and Arizona trying to outright ban violent games in public spaces and the rise of more powerful home gaming systems, arcade operators felt the squeeze from both sides and the industry suffered contractions. Enter Sega.

Specifically, enter Sega, Universal Studios, and Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks  studios. The goal was to create a new type of arcade, a state-of-the-art facility featuring a giant cross-section of entertainment options. Want to drop quarters into classic arcade staples like OutRun? GameWorks had you covered. More interested in taking a friend and blasting through hoards of zombies in House of the Dead? GameWorks could scratch that itch too.

The first GameWorks facility opened in Seattle, Washington in 1997, and it was a grand affair with an estimated ten million dollar price tag. When it proved fruitful, the company started looking for other venues across the country who might be receptive to such a venture. One place they liked was Austin, Texas, a city in the orgiastic throes of violent expansion. GameWorks put forth an ambitious plan for a brand new facility, replete with the latest virtual reality games, modern arcade hits, and retro gaming classics, all for the over-21 set thanks to a little trick we in the business call “the sale of alcohol on the premises”. A huge influx of cash, jobs, and the ability to legally drink and drive by quaffing a beer prior to a game of Indy 500–that’s a win for everybody, so no one could possibly find fault with that, right? That’s a rhetorical question.

There’s always at least one idiot protesting the building of something new, but what’s the last group you’d expect to rise up against a brand new barcade? Did you say “Big Alcohol”? That’s right: the liquor lobby rose up like some sort of perpetually-sloshed Goliath against the three-headed giant funding GameWorks. Wait, the liquor lobby? What is this, the Star Trek Mirror Universe? Yeah…about that…

Pictured: serious business.

A 1936 Texas law aimed at keeping liquor producers out of the sales business is explicit: nobody selling alcohol can be in the practice of brewing or distributing it. There’s no law against Budweiser setting up a brewery in Texas, and bartenders can pour the resultant horse piss into glasses all night long, so long as said bartenders aren’t on Budweiser’s payroll. Unfortunately for GameWorks, liquor industry giant Seagrams owned a 24% share of the company which was enough to get the liquor lobby all shaken and stirred over the issue.

Seagrams, Spielberg, and Sega did their best to argue for an exception for GameWorks, pointing towards a similar situation where Anheuser Busch was permitted to sell beer at San Antonio’s Sea World after they bought it. On top of that, Seagrams and Spielberg were both well-known in the Texas political scene, having given money to numerous candidates over the years. They knew people.

Not the right ones, it turns out. The Wholesale Beer Distributors lobby diverted the matter from the Seagrams’-friendly Economic Development Committee over to their home turf, the State Affairs Committee, where they railed against this exception as violating the “purity” of the three-tier system keeping producers, distributors, and retailers of alcohol separate. In the end Austin sided with Big Liquor, screwing GameWorks out of a massive revenue stream and the city out of 250 new jobs, a $20 million dollar arcade, and thousands of drunk people eager to jam quarters into any slot they could find. Hmmm…maybe it was for the best.

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV.


If he made you laugh, drop a tip in his jar at http://paypal.me/modernzorker


(If he didn't make you laugh, donate to cure his compulsion to bang keyboards by sending an absurdly huge amount of money to his tip jar instead. That'll show him!)