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Today, many children grow up with crazy gaming machines and rigs costing thousands of shekels, but for the children of the 80s and 90s, one of the most amazing places to enjoy gaming was the arcade. The neon lights, the noise of tokens, the highlights of the players who played before you, and people treating with appropriate exaggeration the fact that they are currently playing Golden Ax or Street Fighter.
But alongside all this nostalgia, there is no one who hasn’t ended their day – at least occasionally – with the feeling that some of the games in the arcade are there just to sting you, and that you really had no chance of winning. An engineer – with a career at NASA and Apple – found this to be true, so he set out to sting them back.
The surprise bag
Many know the name Mark Rover thanks to one of the best inventions in the world – the glitter bomb he created against package thieves which he upgrades every year with new amazing capabilities (and the American holiday season is around the corner, so version 5.0 is on the way). In his last video he decided to do some justice and went to the arcade near his house with some interesting tricks up his sleeve (or rather in his bag).
Rover shows in the video how with a bag in which he hid a machine used for softball training (the slower version of baseball), into which he feeds balls through a dummy bottle that sits on the side of the bag, he manages to achieve the best result in Skee-ball. The name may not be familiar to all Israelis, but it is about this game where you have to throw balls towards a small “hill” and from there put them into holes. The holes that will give you the most points are also the hardest to hit, but Rover has managed to calibrate the machine so that every ball he feeds into it will give him the maximum points total. Note that if you have already arrived at the arcade and you want to succeed in the game, your technique should focus mainly on guys who will give you a lower amount of points – but are in the center of the board so it is easier to hit them.
Another game that Rober managed to master is the arcade basketball game: the game that always doesn’t give you enough balls, and even the ones you’ve already received roll towards you the slowest in the world. Rover explains that in order to crack this game, all you had to do was create a custom basketball – the bottom of which rises and falls with the help of a motor to score more points for you. The mechanism of the game includes a laser beam that is sent and every time it breaks, it means that the ball goes into the basket and you get points – and that’s exactly what Rover does with his ball. But how do you keep the ball in place so that it moves all the time and scores more and more points? Rover added two metal rods that are sent out at the push of a button – the ball just needs to reach the basket and from there the road to breaking records is paved.
He also shows how he was able to create with some super strong magnets, a Raspberry Pi and a robotic arm camera that can play head-to-head air hockey against humans as well. Although it is not a classic arcade game that will bring you tickets, it is still cool to see how with the help of computer vision and creativity you can take a bathroom break in the middle of a game and let your bag – and all the other components in it – replace you for a few minutes.
the small letters
A very interesting part of the video involves Rover diving into some of the written manuals for the game machines found in the arcade, and discovering that the fine print of those manuals is worth the arcade owners a lot of money. Rover reveals that in some of the machines, the owners can determine once how many games a person can win the entire jackpot, so that the players have no real way to win unless it is their lucky day and they fell precisely on the number set by the arcade owner for the number of games until the next win.
He also discovers that from a test he conducted – and here you prepare to pick up your dropped jaw from the floor – the familiar “lever” machines are also deceiving us. According to Rover, most machines, with which you can pick up a doll or other prize, will indeed grab your target with full force, but that force will be significantly reduced – depending on the owner’s choice – once the arm starts to move back.
The saddest part of this whole story, from the testing presented by Rover, is the fact that these games – which are not under any regulation, and are mainly intended for children – generate a return of about 20 cents for every dollar invested in them. This is a return that is a quarter of the return produced by slot machines in casinos – those intended for adults only, and those who play them know that they are completely random, in contrast to the arcade game machines that provide players with a false sense of being able to win them by playing for a long time.