Larry Hodgson loved to golf. But, he recently acknowledged, “I was a bad golfer.” Back in the late 1980s, the software engineer resolved to improve his game. He figured others shared the same goal.

At the time, Hodgson had just started working at Incredible Technologies, a suburban Chicago-based maker of arcade games. For his new employer, he began designing a large-scale golf simulator that could be dropped into oversized family entertainment centers like Dave & Busters. That way, parents could practice their swing while their kids pumped quarters into Street Fighter.

The concept, however, didn’t quite work. The idea was too big, too ambitious. Incredible Technologies junked it, but not before Hodgson had built software that allowed him to create virtual golf courses. Why not use that to develop a coin-operated golf game?

With the help of colleague Jim Zielinski, that’s what Hodgson set out to do. They had no clue that their little project eventually would grow into the highest-grossing arcade game of all time. Since its inception a quarter-century ago, Golden Tee has become as ubiquitous at sports bars as dart boards and flat-screen televisions. Playing the game is a beer-soaked American pastime.

“In the years to come, when people talk about arcade games,” Valerie Cognevich, then-editor of arcade trade magazine Play Meter, told the Chicago Tribune in 2003, “Pac-Man and Golden Tee will be in the same paragraph.”

The path to the hearts of Golden Tee-loving bros everywhere was paved with a three-inch trackball.

Before Golden Tee, several games, including Atari Football (1978), featured the spherical device. But few managed to harness its full capabilities. Then, in 1988, Capcom Bowling — a game Incredible Technologies produced — hit arcades. To roll, players had to aim and spin a trackball. The process wasn’t quite analogous to bowling, but it made the game interactive in a way that joysticks and buttons alone couldn’t.

Hodgson and Zielinski wanted to give their golf game a similar feel. Even if they couldn’t replicate a real-life golf swing, the pair thought that the motion of spinning a trackball came close enough.

“Basically your hand mimicked a golfer’s swing,” Zielinski said. “That’s a real crucial element. You actually felt like you were the guy golfing.”

I knew we had something the first time I saw a guy high-five another guy in a bar over a video game Jim Zielinski

The guy golfing also needed a vivid playground in which he could immerse himself. Almost three decades ago, Zielinski was a young game tester at Incredible Technologies. Using a program called Deluxe Paint, a predecessor of Photoshop, he began rendering golf courses. They weren’t as visually stunning as the ones that appear in later editions of Golden Tee, but hey, this was the ’80s.

A big part of the game’s success, Hodgson said, “comes down to the remarkable capacity that Jim has for creating golf courses that don’t necessarily mimic reality in the way that they play, but create a great challenge for the video game player who feels like he’s Tiger Woods.”

At the beginning, the game was a bit too challenging.

“It was really hard to putt,” Hodgson said. “That was a problem.” Chipping wasn’t any easier. “People were clobbering 80 yards past the hole,” Hodgson added.

But as Zielinski watched people play the game, he quickly noticed a startling level of emotional investment. “I knew we had something the first time I saw a guy high-five another guy in a bar over a video game, in that he was proud of what he did,” he said. “That meant we got him.”

And when people shanked shots, Zielinski said, they cursed. It was only natural.

“The great thing about testing in bars over arcades,” Hodgson said, is that if you played poorly, “you could medicate yourself with beer.”

Golden Tee Golf debuted in 1989, not as a standalone game but rather as a replacement kit that could be retrofitted into old arcade cabinets. For the still-fledgling Incredible Technologies, which had been founded four years earlier, the approach was necessarily pragmatic.

“This was a good niche area for us to be in,” Scott Morrison, the company’s vice president of marketing, explained in an email, “since we didn’t have to produce and ship full cabinets.”

Players of the first version of Golden Tee received eight strokes per quarter and could earn more strokes by notching pars, birdies, and eagles. Eventually, the pricing system changed to allow people to buy 18 holes of golf. (Today, one round costs about $4.) Morrison said that the original Golden Tee sold moderately well, but the game franchise truly didn’t take off until Golden Tee 3D was released in 1995. The new edition connected to the nascent Internet, allowing Incredible Technologies to establish a national Golden Tee leaderboard.

“It was the days of AOL and Compuserve,” Zielinski said. “To be able to be connected to other bars and other players is a pretty cool thing back in the day. It really helped it out.”

Internet-enabled tournaments quickly caught on. Top players also soon started being paid cash prizes, which made Golden Tee and its subsequent iterations even more popular. By the early 2000s, the national media had picked up on the craze. In 2003, One bar owner told the New York Times that the presence of a Golden Tee machine had drastically increased his establishment’s earnings.

“People come in here as soon as I open at 11 a.m. and stay until we close, seven days a week,” he told the Times. “I don’t remember a game that has taken over the industry as much as this one.”

The introduction of the Wi-Fi-equipped, hyperrealistic-looking Golden Tee Live in 2005 gave the franchise another boost. Over the course of the last decade, Incredible Technologies claims that players have won more than $50 million in prize money in Golden Tee Live competitions. (A handful of Golden Tee pros are actually making a living playing the game.)

The great thing about testing in bars over arcades” is that if you played poorly, “you could medicate yourself with beer. Larry Hodgson

Instead of regularly rebooting Golden Tee, Incredible Technologies now provides annual game updates. Zielinski still designs every new golf course. In fact, by now he’s made more than 150 of them. His creations have grown more eye-popping and complex over the years, but the way in which players attempt to navigate them hasn’t changed much.

“What I think is amazing is that the trackball and the user interface that we came up with in ’89 are still the ones that we use today,” Zielinski said. “There’s very little change, if any.”

Twenty-six years and 100,000-plus units sold later, Golden Tee remains a phenomenon. These days, Incredible Technologies is developing a mobile edition of the game. In this version, the signature trackball has been replaced by a finger.

However, Hodgson said, “you end up with the same kind of crazy motion as with the trackball.”

On a recent flight, Hodgson decided to kill time by playing an early version of the game on his iPad. After lining up an angled chip shot, he said, “I let my hand fly.” His follow-through sent the gin and tonic sitting on his tray table flying, too. Sadly, nobody in his row gave him a high-five.