Cheap Army Men and Glow Sticks

Ah, the pizza arcade. The hotbed for children!s birthday parties and broken dreams. When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to have birthday parties at two of the best pizza arcades I've ever been to. That, combined with my having been to a slew of birthday parties, I've had my fair share of battles with the games at these places. In a nutshell, these places are like kiddie casinos, with kids paying money to play games of random chance and skill, winning tickets that can be traded in for worthless prizes that eventually litter the bottom of your toy box. The goodie bags you got at these parties often had more valuable stuff in them.

I, along with thousands of kids, have racked up tons of tickets. In some cases, we've saved from birthday party to birthday party, hoping that we earn enough to buy whatever the top prize was. In my youth, there was a signed Michael Jordan poster that took 20,000 tickets to buy. Soon, these places began offering Xboxes and Playstations that not only would take you 2 years worth of your parents salary to get, but by the time you had enough tickets, the Playstation 4 would be nearing the end of its life cycle.

Basically, I've had a lot of broken dreams. Simply put, if these machines took over the world, they'd screw the children first. So today, I take a look back at the games which shaped and ultimately crushed my childhood dreams of winning a large, overstuffed Marvin the Martian replica:

1: Wheel 'M In

Despite the fact that this game paid out a bunch of tickets, I HATED it. Basically, you'd shoot a coin onto this conveyor belt. It would have to land EXACTLY on one of the colored ticket strips painted on the belt, or you'd win nothing. If your coin was just a little off, the machine wouldn't cut you any slack. To make things worse, the Uncle Pennybags-meets-creepy uncle at the top of the machine would taunt you and say something like "Missed it by that much!". What an arrogant bastard.


The company has come out with a new version of the machine to swindle a new generation of ticket hunters called Wheel 'M In Extreme. It's the same game play, which, in turn, probably induces the same punch-a-hole-in-the-glass feeling deep in my gut.


2: Colorama

Colormama was made by Bromley, the same company who produced Wheel 'M In, so you know there's some sort of scam going on here. Colorama was the most thinly veiled way to bring the roulette wheel to the pizza arcade. You'd put a coin in and bet on which colored section a small bouncy ball would land in. Each colored section was a different size; the smaller the section, the more tickets it would pay out if you bet on it and won. This is probably the fairest game on my list, but that's not saying much. On top of that, when the wheel would spin, the machine would break into poetic verse, spouting "Round and round and round it goes// Where it stops, Nobody knows!" Actually, yeah, you do. You know goddamn well where it stops. Because you're a fucking machine with a twisted computer brain."

3: Progressive Skee Ball

Now don't get me wrong- I love Skee Ball- it's one of my favorite games in the arcade to this day and will probably be the first thing I buy for my future rumpus room (I just wanted to say rumpus room)! But Progressive Skee Ball is a bastard. The premise is that there's a bank of Skee Ball machines, all connected to this one ticket jackpot. To win the jackpot, you have to hit a really high target score (which is usually damn near a perfect game). Every few unsuccessful jackpot attempts raises the jackpot until someone hits it or the arcade shuts down for the day, at which point the jackpot resets to a paltry 200 tickets, or something like that. If this system sounds familiar, it is- it's the same one that casinos use for slot jackpots.

4: Cyclone
Alright, now everyone has played this game before. I've dropped more coin in this machine than most people ever will, and I'll tell you what- I have NEVER won the jackpot. NEVER. You see those two arches right in front of that button? The object is to stop a rotating light (seen here near the pink arches) in between your arches by hitting your button.

I hate this game. With a passion. I used to mindlessly drop tokens in this one just hoping to win. Then, once I began to see how rigged this game was, I dropped more tokens in, eventually hoping to win just to spite the machine. Yes, I said it- to spite a MACHINE. If Wheel 'M In didn't make me crazy, this game did.

5: Coin Pushers

Every pizza arcade had them, but nobody ever quite understands how they work. I'll tell you- shitty. That's how they work. You basically drop coins down a Plinko-like wall, and they work their way across a pusher. In essence, you're hoping your coin is the one that causes some of those coins on the edge to fall off. You win those coins that fall off (and in the case of cheaper arcades, you get a couple tickets for each coin instead. Unfortunately, no matter the theme of the machine- whether it's outer space themed, music themed, or even Price is Right themed (yep, there's one of those), you never win a goddamned thing. Only one of every 60 million people has lived to tell their happy ending with these gold coin stealing whores.

6: Any Kiddie Machines

Technically, all of the machines on my list are kiddie machines, but I mean the ones that are for the kids who are too young to ever know what they hell they're doing. The smaller basketball machines with a 2 foot hoop, the Bozo Buckets machine, and a couple others fit this category. If you were 10 or 11, you thought you found a way to cheat these machines- you'd rack your score up to like 58,000 and you got rewarded with a paltry 7 tickets, since that's the ceiling that the operators set for it. Dejected, you went back to playing big kid machines, since the effort definitely wasn't worth the reward.


So, after winning Army men with faulty parachutes, half opened Warhead candies, the occasional Whoopie Cushion, and a few temporary tattoos, I can't say I didn't have a good time. But I would have been a lot happier with a bunch of stuff that ultimately, would have been cheaper had I bought it at retail price.

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