I
have a rule that I don’t start an article with pointless,
seminonsensical puns. For example, if I were writing about those games
at arcades which give out tickets it might’ve been something like:
“Sometimes making children feel like winners is ‘Just the Ticket’ for
someone who wants to succeed in the arcade business!” or “Sometimes a
visit to the local arcade is like being in a ‘Ticket Tape Parade’, you
never quite know what’ll come up!”

But
I won’t do that.
Instead, I think I’ll just write whatever random crap comes into my
head, and when it seems to have gotten too long, I’ll stop abruptly.
Yeah. That’s what I’ll do.

So What’s That About Arcade Games Now?

Oh,
yeah. I guess before I begin I should probably explain what I was gonna
write about. It’s pretty simple: There’re these machines in
arcades which aren’t necessarily games per-se. At their best they’re
things like carnival type challenges (throwing balls into or at things)
and at their worst they’re overt casinoesque near-scams meant to siphon
tokens away from naive children.

These aren’t the games people play for
fun; they’re the ones they play for tickets; tickets which can then be
redeemed for fun!

But of course this is a lie. These tickets most definitely will NOT be redeemed for fun, because they can only be redeemed for a
series of crap prizes which no child would ever even willingly pick out
of a dumpster, let alone buy. But, when stupid toys are behind a
counter and you have to win them, they become infinitely more desirable
to Stupid American Children. It’s the way we were raised.

Alright, What Kinds of Prizes Are There?

Well,
first of all I’d like to point out that I feel that referring to these things as prizes is being extremely generous. They’ve
usually got cheap stuff like a crushed piece of Warhead candy (50
tickets) or a misshapen army parachutist (100 tickets). Then there are also
usually some more expensive prizes nobody would ever be able to afford,
like a stereo boombox (6,000 tickets) or a 9” black & white TV
(20,000 tickets).

So you’re pretty much spending hundreds of dollars to
get the tickets for junk items which would cost about 60 dollars if you were to purchase them at a discount store. Shazam!

Now Tell About The Games!

Alright,
if you say so. But you don’t need to shout at me. Here are the greatest
Ticket Scams of all time. And by greatest I mean the ones I can
remember. You
had better pay attention if you know what’s good for you. Those who
don’t learn their history are destined to repeat it.

Bozo the Clown & His Magnificent Buckets

Bozo’s
“game” is simply a long cabinet featuring a bunch of cheap metal
buckets arranged in a straight line. When a player inserts a coin into
the game, some soiled ping-pong balls drop from a slot and they’re
meant to toss these into the buckets (the furthest away being worth
the most points). While this is going on, Bozo shouts bizarre curses at
the player from a tinny
speaker.

Obviously, this game is too frightening for the small
children it’s meant for, so usually it’s played by older kids looking
to score a lot of tickets. The kid usually puts his coin in, makes sure
nobody is looking, climbs onto the cabinet, and begins tossing every
ball into the furthest (and highest scoring) bucket as fast as
he can until the time runs out.

“Great job! Hoo-hoo-ha-ha-hah!”
Bozo will cry with chilling earnestness, and then this boy will smile to
himself, thinking he has gotten one over on the establishment. But when
he kneels down to tear off the FOUR tickets his score of Seven Hundred
and Nineteen Trillion has gotten him, he will see that this is certainly not the case.

Some
might say the moral of this story is “Don’t Cheat”, but these people
would be mistaken. The true moral is: “Arcades are better at cheating
than you are, so don’t try
it.”

Wheel-Em-In

Wheel In So how does it work? Well there’s this conveyor belt painted with rows of colored tickets
alternating with blank spaces, see. And the objective is to roll your coin in
through the slot so that it lands in the exact center of one of the
trails. Then, you win that amount of tickets! You can’t go wrong! Most of the rows are labeled with something like 10-40
tickets, but there’s one very small row which is usually worth anywhere
from 100-200 tickets. It’s a beautiful thing, really it is.

So
it should be pretty apparent how this thing works: It looks like fun;
like it’s easy to win, but really neither of these things is true.
Maybe I can explain it another way. You see the old man up there in the
picture? The generic Uncle Pennybags ripoff with all the tickets
clutched in his hands? Yeah, well that’s the guy who made this game.
And do you know what he’s doing up there? That’s right, he’s WHEELING
‘M IN. And guess who ‘M is. Yeah. That’s right. It’s you.

The Sucker.

So walk away, Sucker. Just walk away.

Coin Drop

So
you walk up to this machine and look in through the glass on the front.
You see large stacks of tokens teetering on the edge of a cliff. A
small shelf at the back moves forward and backward, slowly. “Ho ho,”
you think to yourself, “I’ve really come across it here…just one coin
in the slot and all these little beauties come clattering down into the
slot.” You begin rubbing your hands together, “I’ll be rich, I tell you, rich!”

You
wait for just the
right moment, and pop a coin into the slot. It slides down and lands on
the shelf, pushing one or two other tokens forward a few centimeters.
You growl through clenched teeth, and put another in. Nothing. Soon you
are furiously clicking coin after coin into the
rails, hoping desperately to cause at least ONE of the tokens inside
the machine to fall. And still nothing happens. You bang lightly on the
glass, hoping
to knock a few coins free. No luck. You wander casually over beside the
machine, and bump against it with your hip while clearing your
throat loudly. Silence. You begin to walk away, but suddenly an
impotent rage boils up from within you, and you turn and deliver a hard
kick to front of the machine. Somewhere, an alarm begins to sound. You
hurry off into the crowd, weaving through machines and covering your
face with your hand as a young man with jingling keys hurries past. But you’ll be back.

They always come back…