With Perfect Pour, You Become a Digital Bartender

Beer and video games are a great pairing. There have even been several beer-themed video and arcade games over the years. Perhaps the most famous is Tapper, the Budweiser branded game where players control a bartender who moves between customers slinging filled mugs.

Cold Beer is a skill-based game where players must control a rising platform and deposit a metal ball into numbers corresponding with each level. The more physical pints a player has, the harder this game becomes.

Now there is a new entry to the electronic beer entertainment space. Perfect Pour is the creation of DSM Arcade in Iowa, which has players working to pour their own beers in a precise manner. Dan Fessler, the founder of the game company talked to All About Beer editor John Holl about the development and recent partnership with Pabst Brewing Co.

The Conversation

John Holl: Let’s start off by talking about DSM arcade, and your original goals. I love the entrepreneurial spirit. I think you know I spend a lot of time in the beer space, talking with folks who like to make something that brings people enjoyment, and camaraderie, and fun. And I feel like there’s probably synergies between the beer industry and your industry.

Dan Fessler: It literally started as a like all good companies in a garage in a back alley. We moved into a house, and it had a big wood shop from the from the old man who lived here before us. And I was just like, well, there’s a wood shop. I might as well build something. I’ve always jumped from hobby to hobby and one day me and my high school buddies met up and went to an arcade bar in in Des Moines called Up Down. We were playing the four player Ninja Turtles cabinet and one of my friends said I should build one.

So, I looked up some plans of that exact cabinet, and got some $20 crummy, Black and Decker tools, and hacked one together. And it looked awful, but it worked. Eventually the joystick started ripping out of the control panel because they weren’t properly secured, but that was the start of it.

John Holl: How did Perfect Pour come together? What was the inspiration for the game?

Dan Fessler: It was a real, true light bulb moment.  There’s a great brewery in Des Moines that I’ve been going to since we moved here in 2012 called Confluence Brewing Company. In 2019, right before the the pandemic I was sitting at the bar with my wife, and it was happy hour and they were busy. There’s a bartender, Justin, who is just dashing back and forth across their wall of 20 taps.

He’d start a beer on one end and run to the other side, pour a five ounce pour and then run back to the big one to finish it off. He’s just running back and forth doing this over and over and I’m just sitting there sipping by beer and watching this multitasking. Then the thought popped into my head that this would be an awesome game. It’s stressful and you must manage everything well really quickly.

I sent a message to our developer who lives in Leeds in the UK, and told him some rough ideas of what I was thinking it could be. He put together a little alpha build of this game in a few weeks, and we played a but a bit and it was a lot of fun. Then we got sidelined by another project we were working on and then the pandemic hit. It wasn’t until a few years later that we decided to pick this back up.

John Holl: The game came first, and then the relationship with Pabst came after, right?

Dan Fessler: In the standard Perfect Pour. It’s pixel art graphics; it’s a different art style. We designed it in mind for arcade bars and breweries, because you can customize the in-game logo that appears in-game. If Confluence had a Perfect Pour. They could put a pixel art version of the Confluence logo in the gameplay. You can also customize the attract mode (the welcome screen that happens outside of game play) and put in weekly events or specials.

I always thought, because of Tapper back in the day, that I liked that idea of partnering it with a beer brand. Esthetically, that sounded like an exciting thing to do, just to meld the two together. If people see brand they recognize and trust, they’re more willing to give the game a shot.

Pabst was the first brand I thought about. Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) just seemed like the perfect match for it, I could even visualize in my mind the cabinet in red, white, and blue with wood grain looking great. PBR is also cool brand for people freshly 21 to guys who have been drinking it for 40 years. It spreads demographics, so you can put it in an arcade bar, but also neighborhood bars.  I sent them a cold email and got connected to the marketing team and then the licensing team. It all came together.

John Holl: You mentioned that when you first thought of this, breweries like Confluence came to mind. With this Pabst deal, is that still possible? Or does it mean that we won’t be able to see other brewery or bar branded machines?

Dan Fessler: The PBR version has really blown up. We had a post that did 5 million views and 150,000 likes, or something like that. It was just me doing some gameplay in my garage, a 24 second video, and it just absolutely went nuts, and so we’ve had tons and tons of interest, and it’s kind of expanded how we’re thinking about the game and versions of the game.

The standard Perfect Pour still exists. You can still get that and put your logo in the in the game. We’ve got our arcade bar version; we’ve got our neighborhood bar version. We’re thinking maybe someday we’ll have our brewer’s edition, or something like that for a brewery. But right now, that’s really the standard version. Any brewery can get that.

John Holl: When do consoles start shipping? How can people order? How many are you already planning on sending out the door?

Dan Fessler: We will start shipping in just a couple weeks. Everything’s with the factory, and they’re ready to be built. We’re just working quickly and don’t want to slow the momentum, so we’re trying to scale up as fast as we can and meet demand. We’re trying to grow our operations responsibly, but quickly so we can meet demand for this game. This is ongoing, so orders are always open.

This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

Pull Up a Stool is a regular feature on All About Beer. Reach out to editor John Holl at JohnHoll@allaboutbeer.com with suggestions on brewing professionals that should be featured. And to support our journalism, please AllAboutBeer.com/support