The College Station of my youth featured a variety of businesses and restaurants covered on this website (as of 2025 most if not all have been covered), and among them was Putt-Putt Golf. Opened July 31, 1988, the original set-up of the local Putt-Putt Golf (owned by franchisee Tom Turbiville) was little more than a collection of lighted putting greens and a clubhouse, with a notable lack of windmills and other features, as Putt-Putt was designed to be skill-based rather than luck.
In 1991, the golf course was sold to the corporation, which revamped it with bumper boats, a batting cage, and aesthetic upgrades to the park including several fiberglass animal statues (giraffes, elephants, etc.) for a vague "safari" theme. Other enhancements, like a larger clubhouse and a go-kart track were scuttled.
I want to say that the clubhouse wasn't air-conditioned though I'm not sure about that. In any case, while the bumper boats and mini-golf were unique, it was no Gattiland. If you wanted to have fun as a kid in those days or wanted a cool place to have a birthday, you went to Gattiland, case closed. (The public swimming pools were a close second.) No one at my school wanted to do a birthday at Putt-Putt. Probably because of that fact (and everyone knew it), Putt-Putt just got sadder and more run-down over the years. The bumper boats went first, closing in the early 2000s (not that it was very big, I think it could only fit four), then the Putt-Putt name ("Brazos Valley Golf & Games" was the new name, though even by 2006 it was still known as Putt-Putt according to the newspaper). By 2005, they had converted the bumper boats area to a skatepark, which seemed mildly popular. In 2006, it was closed permanently, with only some tattered mini-golf holes, an overgrown abandoned batting cage, and those fiberglass animals, now fading in the sun.
Eventually the batting cage and mini-golf remnants were demolished, and the bumper boats area filled in for good for its new tenant: Paradise Scuba, which relocated from Parkway Square. They doubled the size of the old arcade building, even adding in a swimming pool inside (why they didn't use the old Bumper Boats area, who knows). They did, however, leave the lighthouse from the bumper boats area, though the lower rungs were removed so you couldn't climb up.
Paradise Scuba opened in September 2008 closed in June 2012 for good, despite the renovations to the property. Two years later, it reopened as a second location of Aggieland Cycling, which presumably filled in the pool inside. Neither business used the old batting cages area, and in late 2016, Domino's began to build a new location there (replacing their location on Texas Avenue near Deacon and Sunset Gardens), which opened in April 2017. The Domino's (no "Pizza" anymore due to corporate rebranding) has the address of 1801 Valley View, and unlike its old location, features dine-in seating. Weirdly, the official "entrance" to the pizza restaurant is the far side of Aggieland Cycling's parking lot, the closer driveway (shared with Aggieland Cycling) is supposed to be an exit-only lane.
The lighthouse is the last recognizable piece of Putt-Putt (and even then, the 1991 re-do) and since the loss of Putt-Putt, there wasn't anything resembling mini-golf for a long time. Sure, Grand Station Entertainment had indoor glow-in-the-dark mini-golf with some Western theme going on, and of course (more recently) PopStroke but during the late 2000s and 2010s...nothing.
UPDATE 01-16-2025: Major rewrite done.
