El Paso, TX: After months of researching and brainstorming, Brian Murphy, owner of the bar and entertainment lounge “North of The Border,” ignored all pop culture jokes and installed Guitar Hero at his establishment yesterday. This traditional Texan bar still sports a bull-riding machine, big-screen TVs, Budweiser, live country music three days a week, and a condom machine in the men’s room. The twist is that on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights, drunken cowboys crooning on-stage will be replaced by drunken college kids, a projection TV and a Fisher-Price electric guitar, the perfect arrangement for a Guitar Hero competition.
Guitar Hero is a video game using a specialized electric guitar with buttons instead of strings, and a fake(like the rest of the guitar) whammy bar. With this toy you are able to pretend to play classic songs such as “Raining Blood” by Slayer, “Barracuda” by Heart, and “Cult of Personality” by Living Colour. By gaining points, you can have the visual representation of fans either flash their breasts at you or throw empty beer bottles at your head.
Many bar owners have taken this game on as a featured night for the joke value, plugging it into a generally slow night in the hopes that some drunken idiots will get a kick out of pretending to be rock stars. This normally takes the place of the karaoke machine for a week or two, until everyone reaches the game’s level of being too inebriated to put a guitar strap on, and then vomiting into the lap of the person next to you, completing the picture of a real rock star. Mr. Murphy, however, doesn’t plan on putting the game away in the near future.
“What I am most concerned about is getting new blood into my bar,” Brian Murphy stated. “These young kids are the ones making the money these days. I have to cater to what they enjoy, even if it is something so fake as pretending to play guitar on my stage.”
When asked what will happen to the stage competition when the fad is over, Murphy replied, “Fad? I don’t believe in fads. I believe that things can last as long as you want them too. See these neon parachute pants I’m wearing? You’d think these would have lasted fifteen years if I believed in running my business based on fads?”
Murphy’s outlook is quite plausible. Video games go hand in hand with the latest financial boom of the last ten years, the internet. When these internet kings finally leave their parents’ basements to spend their money socializing instead of getting a new patch for World of Warcraft or some porn that they can’t download, where will they go? Brian Murphy hopes that North of the Border may be that place.
“Look, I know I may be alienating some of my regulars with these changes,” Murphy stated. “Gus over there had at least half of his teeth when he first came here fifteen years ago, and now I think they’re all false. But the fact is that I had to comp about half his drinks, or else he’d never come here with his trucker buddies. These days he doesn’t even drive a truck, so he just comes in here getting free drinks. I don’t need him, or any other people like that. I need to get some paying customers in here.”
The Guitar Hero stage at the moment has a bedspread for a screen, but Murphy plans to get a real screen soon “like those upscale Guitar Hero bars up in Vegas.” The owner has also contemplated allowing female employees to be hired for “crowd support,” becoming actual screaming fans for a fee. Murphy sees this as the new “lap-dance” for the techno generation. The bar is also to have a Wi-Fi connection, and will replace the Bull-Riding machine with a VR unit, thus sucking the last bit of manliness from the bar and making it safe for the new generation.