What Happened To ARKEG After Shark Tank?

During the January 4, 2013 episode of "Shark Tank," inventors Brant Myers and Dan Grimm showed a product to the sharks that combined two things millions of people do every single day: playing video games and drinking beer. Myers and Grimm were high school buddies in San Luis Obispo, California, who ended up as roomies in college, according to Gazette Review. Like many typical college students, they spent a lot of time, well, playing video games and drinking beer.

As comedy movies have taught the world, people are at their smartest when they're drinking, and Myers and Grimm had an epiphany one fateful night after imbibing some adult beverages. They put their "manufacturing and electrical knowledge" to work and came up with the ARKEG, a stand-up video arcade unit combined with a home kegerator. You would think combining these ideas together would be on par with peanut butter and jelly, but alas, it was not so.

The gaming side of ARKEG sported a 24-inch LCD screen with 2.1 high-definition surround sound and two glorious old-school joysticks, a trackball, and all the buttons (per Modern Man). It came with 69 pre-loaded arcade games, from "Asteroids" and "Centipede" to "Mortal Kombat" and "Xenophobe." You could even add games over Wi-Fi or through a direct connection, boosting the total number to some 15,000. It is unknown if ARKEG actually had the legal right to distribute all these games. Perhaps their lawyers had enough beer to overlook the issue.

The beer-drinking side of ARKEG consisted of a 5-gallon corny keg in the cabinet underneath the control deck (via Cool Material). A corny keg holds roughly 50 12oz beers compared to 165 from a standard keg, giving you several hours of intoxicated gaming. The tap was located on the left side of the cabinet and, as Wired Magazine pointed out, did not come with a drip tray or cup holders.

Myers and Grimm went into the tank asking for $100,000 in exchange for a 33% share of their company (Drink n Game), and the sharks wasted no time in swimming right on by this idea (per Shark Tank Products). After failing to secure funding, they apparently tried to build and sell the brew-spewing gaming rigs themselves for $4,000 each.

In May 2015 Drink n Game Tweeted that their business was for sale and came with eight completed ARKEGs. A few more attempts were made — one in October of the same year, then another in November — with one final plea coming in April 2016. And that's the last Tweet the company made. The Drink n Game website is no longer functioning and ARKEGs seem to now be collector's items. You can buy DrinkNGame.com, but the machines are no longer for sale.

While the ARKEG had potential, it ultimately went down the wrong way and is one of the greatest frat failures of all time.