MARIETTA, Ga. The beer was flowing and the baseball game was on, but the focus was squarely on dozens of much more heated competitions going on around this crowded pub. Veteran gamers were dancing their fingers for a "Guitar Hero 2" tournament, and dozens of spectators were cheering them on in between swills of import brews.
Elsewhere in the dusky joint, crowds huddled around big screen TVs watching players test their hand-eye coordination on dozens of PlayStation 3, XBox 360, and Wii consoles. Others wouldn't pry their eyes from the addictive multi-player games they were playing on souped-up computers RPGs piped into the Internet. It was one of the busiest nights yet at Battle Brew, a bar in suburban Atlanta that offers a different sort of atmosphere for video game play - an adult one.
Yeah, there were a handful of kids around occasionally tugging at a mother's side to ask for a few more bucks. But this is clearly a bar that does bachelor's parties equally as well as birthday parties. Tables of twenty-something friends gathered around a few tables to pound back beers before tackling "World of Warcraft.
" Aging editions of Atari Age Magazine and Nintendo comics plastered on the walls evoked an era of simpler games. And more than a few women lined up to take on the "Guitar Hero" champions. "Most people have these games at home," said Andrew Dewar, who opened the place with his wife a year and a half ago.
"But it's a lonely way of playing. They come here and play with their friends. It's much more of a social camaraderie, like a sports bar.
" The bar can get pretty crowded on weekends, when as many as 80 people pack the strip mall site. Gamers shell out $6 for an hour of play, or $20 for an all-day package, but a few head right to the games when they walk in. These are the ones who bought the $120 monthly all-you-can-play packages, for all the "Call of Duty 2," "Day of Defeat" and "Everquest" they can stomach.
And since they can order food from the console, some sit and play the addictive role-playing games until the bar shuts down hours before dawn. "We have to kick people out at closing time - but we give them a 10-minute warning so they can find a saving point," Dewar said. Zach Gaskins, a 30-year-old computer specialist, has watched the different types of people who come to the bar since it opened.
"There's the after-school crowd, the Friday night crowd, the parents who set the kids in the back while they drink," he said. "I like the fact that there's a lot of things you can do." If today's twenty-somethings spent weekends in grade school at dingy mall arcades and holed up in college dorms with their PlayStations and GameCubes, then maybe the video game pub is just the next step.
"It seems like this type of place is a natural evolution from an arcade," Gaskins said. "It's a pub for geeks." You must be a user to post comments.
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