With only a handful of tokens and a pitiful strand of tickets to my name, things looked grim. I'd never get a good prize with such a low number of points. I needed the ultimate quick fix, and I thought I found it in the form of a big glass box drenched in quarters...
You've seen these, aye? I rarely win a single token on 'em, but who can resist? For one thing, in the rare cases that you do win, you usually win a lot. I'm not talking about 50 points -- we're going into the hundreds, easy. And you know what hundreds of points worth of tokens can get you? I've got three sentence fragments for you: Hillary Clinton. Shaped like. Salt shaker.
K, so you throw a quarter in, and the hope is that your single coin will tip the scales and force a pile of stagnant quarters into the bottomless pit in the front, magically transforming them into nearly worthless plastic tokens before crapping 'em out in a soulful dispenser by your knees. Every token that comes forth will be accompanied by an electronic coin-spitting "THUMP," making you feel much more accomplished than you normally would for trading quarters in for 10-point tokens. Wait, it gets better.
Many of these sorts of games have special bonus ramps and whatnot for champions with incredible aim. For example, some of 'em have these little surfer dude icons attached to a long coin plank. If you manage to slip your quarter down the Plinko board and onto this plank, the machine basically loses its mind, flipping out with all kinds of beeping noises as it spits out eighty-seven 50-point tokens. Before the reality of what these tokens can actually buy you sets in, you'll feel like you won the damn Lotto.
But!
This is the deadliest machine in the entire casino arcade. It's able to suck your money faster than every other game combined. You'll become so fixated on winning that, upon buying your third roll of quarters, you'll forgo the traditional ritual of banging the roll's midsection on the side of the machine to release its quarters and just start biting the wrapper off so as not to waste valuable losing-money-fast time. I've done this, and now I have herpes.
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Similarly, check this one out -- it's kind of like a crane game, only instead of a claw, you've got this pulverizing metal mantis shrimp hammer that can, conceivably, attach magnetically to the one of the tubs full of tokens shown above. Aside from the incredible amount of points scored from the tokens inside, the arcade awards you an additional 500 just for returning the tub! It's the ultimate tease, and I've never won it. I've never seen anyone else win it. I'm not entirely sure it's possible. I bet the arcade's security team point the cameras right at this machine so they'll have something to laugh at while they're stuck in the converted broomcloset monitoring room for ten hours a day.
Casino arcades are, of course, just crawling with prizes. They're everywhere. On the ceiling, in a hundred glass display cases, on rotating cake shower-offers...just everywhere. Course, the ones you see while gallivanting from one side of the arcade to the other are the more extravagant prizes that run thousands of points. You gotta be a rich man, folks. The more normally afforded prizes are kept inside the infamous "prize center," which I'll show you in just a little bit.
Here's a good example -- they've got all of these wonderful prize televisions on display, instilling a sense in arcade visitors that they're one jackpot away from winning something they actually want. Now, I've done the math. This is a very generous figure, but let's assume that you can transform 20 bucks into 2,000 points consistently. This wasn't the case for me or anyone I was with, but for argument's sake, let's say it's legit. Now, check out the television point values. For a 27" Sony Wega, you'll need an astonishing 502,000 points. Stay with me here...
500,000 / 2,000 = 250. 250 x 20.00 = 5,000.00. Cost of 27" Sony Wega from the Casino Arcade: 5,000 DOLLARS.
So, let's check out Amazon...
I found the very same television here. They wouldn't show me the price until I put it in my cart, but once there, a stunning fact smacked me in the head. Cost of 27" Sony Wega from Amazon: 379.00.
The choice is yours. Don't be a God damned idiot.
These neon bar lights were also out of my price range. I so wanted the glowing flamingo. :(
I needed a break, so I spent a few minutes hitting dinosaurs on the skull with a big foam mallet. Got really into it, too. I was all animated and stuff. Unbeknownst to my conscious self at the time, I had let out a guttural "YEAH!" each time I managed to crack another prehisto. After finishing the game and collecting the four piece of shit tickets it gave me, I noticed a bunch of fourteen-year-old girls laughing at me. Remember the Gizmo photo booth pic from page one? Well, that's why I was in there. I needed a hole to crawl into and die. Gizmo understood. Bye Billy.
Shown above are one of those "One Win Choice" ball pits. You bet on a specific color and number where you think the ball will land, and if you're lucky, you'll actually get the throw the ball. I've won this before, so it's not impossible. I didn't win this time. In hindsight, I wish the gigantic fuzzy dice were one of the prize selections back when I won. All I got was a Raggedy Ann doll shaped like a pillow.
Not really sure what these things are, but every kid in the place had 'em. Of all the crane machine prizes in the arcade, I guess these were the easiest to pick up. They're best described as octopus yo-yos. Walking through a more crowded part of the arcade will get your crotch hit with stray shots no less than a dozen times. After a while, you kinda look forward to it.
Hmmm. Cross your eyes a bit and check out that picture. Doesn't it look like Steve Tyler's cradling a severed foot?
Okay guys, it's time. We'd racked up all the points we could. We spent our life savings. It was time to cash in our tokens for a receipt to paradise. With our heads held high and our tubs of tokens well protected, we waltzed up to the glass counter and begged for service. Place really needed a bell. You know where we're going, and it's the heart of any casino arcade. The place where dreams are forged and promises broken. Incidentally also the place where you ask where the nearest place to piss is. It's. The.
Oh boy, where do I start? The prize center is an enigma, and what's worse, it's swarming with really greedy children and parents too obliviously tired to give a shit when their kids are acting unbelievably rude and uncouth. If you're standing in front of a prize window they want to peep into, the kids have no qualms about pushing you aside with their vile little hands. You can't even really do anything about it, because as much fun as it'd be to kick them ten feet away, you'll just end up with more trouble than the glory is worth. You've just gotta endure the torture, and hope that the next bored arcade worker who needs to look busy chooses you as their menial task.
After separating your tokens by point value (a sign sternly warns that you won't be helped until you've done this), some beast hauls 'em off to another counter and returns with a receipt listing your points. We only had about 3,000 or so. At the time, the number sounded great to me. We weren't going at the games too hardcore, and 3,000 points sounds like it should translate into a prize of moderate value, aye? Oh guess again you toad. With the rest of the prizes on display banished due to their preclusively high point values, we were stuck picking loot from the cancerous prize center racks. Take a look...
Jesus, we barely had enough for a plastic Spider-Man tumbler. Awful.
It was a foregone conclusion I chose to ignore, but I knew where our points had to be spread. It's the section of the arcade no player wants to see. It's a place where dreams are crushed by a mix of Taiwanese plastic and small notepads shaped like happy faces. We were going into the trenches, folks. We had to hit the... ugh... Cheapy Section.
Ah, the Cheapy Section. I don't want to come down too hard on it, because honestly, it was my favorite part of the casino arcade as a kid. Yeah, the prizes suck, but I was always more interested in getting a lot of shitty prizes rather than one semi-decent one. I wanted a big bag of jingling crap. Over the years, I've seen the many changing nuances of the Cheapy Section. I've seen it evolve from plastic spider rings and paper-thin Gumby pendants to large rows full of more of the same. At most, the prizes found here will only cost a few hundred points. Better yet, there's a full gamut of ultra cheap prizes that run between 5 and 20 points. Even with a modest total, kids can waltz away from the prize center feeling like they'd hit the jackpot. Only jackpot in the world that gives its winner an assortment of cocktail umbrellas and bird warbler whistles.
Even though I'm way too old to be doing this now, I still get a kick out of using my points to lift dozens of little stupid plastic toys from the Cheapy Section. I've long called casino arcades "home of the plastic spider ring," and though I'd convinced myself that it was tongue-in-cheek, because it's such a funny joke and all, the truth was right there...
Plastic spider rings, 5 points a pop. No casino arcade is complete without them, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. I understand the need to have one 5-point entity lurking about, because there's indeed some kids too uncoordinated to score anything higher. But why a plastic spider ring? Is that the only avenue? Can't they make whimsical stickers the typical 5-pointers? There's gotta be some significance to it. Maybe the guy who invented casino arcades really liked spiders.
After tallying up and counting down our points, here's what we went home with. It's Christmas in July!
What fun! Everything from generic crayons to heart-shaped erasers! Check out the bootleg Hulk and Spongebob bubble containers -- those ran 500 points each, believe it or not. And, what seems to be a normal rubber lizard figure is actually a rubber lizard figure with a clip-on accessory, so kids can pretend they have a well-trained pet lizard. If anyone calls foul, they flash 'em their new badge.
We probably spent a hundred bucks or so total, counting the cranes and video games, slot machines, quarter-poppers and whatever else took us in our moment of insanity. Hey, you know what? No regrets. It's all in good fun. I'd do it again in a second, but what do you know? I'm broke.
