A&W (Attack Machines)

In the Attack Machines timeline, **A&W** is presumably the world's leading fast-food restaurant, competing against White Castle in parts of the USA and Asia (consider this as a small-scale equivalent of the McDonald's-Burger King competition). Its biggest market at the time of the Purge (see below) was Florida. It is known for its draft root beer, root beer floats and burgers.

## History

Before the Purge, A&W had existed since 1919, when the first root beer stand set up by Roy W. Allen was set up. The chain was franchised starting in the mid-1920s. By the time of the Purge, there were restaurants in the American Southwest - mostly California - its home state - and Nevada.

With news of the impending Kraventhorn attack in November 1946, and aware of the cells in Florida, the company founders and some of their staff moved to Orlando. They were all in one of the cells. Once they were released in mid-February 1947, the survivors, including a businessman from Nebraska that had moved there in January, restarted the business from scratch, at a much limited scale, compared to what it was in 1919, as a pop-up restaurant in the Orlando area.

By the 2000s, the chain resurged in the Midwest (at the time the Mandate of the Great Lakes).

The chain celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2019.

## By country

### Florida

Florida has ten restaurants, two of which are in Orlando. These are mostly found in large cities. Some of these are year-round operations while others are open only during spring and summer.

### USA

A number of restaurants can be found in the cities of New York and Philadelphia - places where they compete against White Castle. On the other hand, in Kentucky, the chain is the only such quick-service restaurant available.

### California

Untouched by the Reformed United States, with the growing potential in new trade routes emerging in the 2000s, A&W resumed business in its birth state in 2009, in time for its 90th anniversary. It held a monopoly in the fast-food sector in California until Dairy Queen opened in 2015.

### Canada

A restaurant opened in 2016. Independently-owned, only the name and a limited number of menu items are shared with the Floridian/American chain. The bear was adopted too but has a slightly different appearance.

### Singapore

A restaurant opened there in 2011, the first such restaurant in the country.

### UK

There were plans to enter the British market in 2018, but these were shelved because a government officer found root beer "disgusting". White Castle, though, was allowed to give the go-ahead.

## Related

### Root Beer Tycoon

Of a similar vein to the OTL game Lemonade Tycoon (though closer to the OTL 1973 game Lemonade Stand), Floridian computer engineers created a text game called Root Beer Tycoon, presumably sponsored by the company, and inspired by how A&W began. In it, the player moves through several rounds of running a root beer stand (presumably an A&W one), beginning each round by making choices dependent on their current amount of money about their stock, prices, and advertising. In each round, the results are randomized based on the player's inputs, as well as affected by random events such as thunderstorms and street closures. Each round ends with a summary of the player's current status, and the game ends after 12 rounds.

### Mascot

While the bear was a Canadian invention OTL (that was later popularized by the American brand), in this timeline, the bear (introduced in 1999, 25 years later) was paying tribute to California, where the company began. The bear was made to be "modern", in order to create a sense of "new" among kids. New characters were added in subsequent years, especially after the reentrance in California in 2009. At this time the name Rooty was coined.