Just as the title states, did anyone here on these forums work in the arcade business back in the day? (Or even now, i guess.) Here's what I am talking about:
-Route Operators
-Arcade Owners/Employees
-Repair Techs
-Or even Programmers/developers for the games themselves
I am somewhat new here and was just wondering if anyone has a story or two to share of their time spent working with arcade games as their actual profession.
I was a helper of sorts at a Miami family amusement center called "Pirates" around 1984-86. Not only they had a nice big arcade, they had indoor rides. Most of the time I took the tickets and loaded in people into the rides, but sometimes I was asked to help out in the arcade hall. I was lucky enough to see every game title the early to mid-80s offered. Every obscure game, every lasergame had a chance to be seen the light of day in that arcade.
I did the facility stuff (clean), but I was asked a few times to help remove the coin boxes and dump the coins into a hopper. Dragon's Lair during the first week made a nice amount of money, but weeks later no-one would play the game anymore because they would just break. We later received a Mach3 cockpit, Star Rider sitat, and a Cube Quest - much better efforts, although they did not last long running. I remember techs came to look at the broke Mach3, I thought they were going to fix it, but they made it into a Choplifter.
Cube Quest only lasted 1 week from what I was told, then it was removed. I only saw it when it was taken out of the truck since afterwards I left for a few weeks. Didn't play it.
Since I was a "bigger" guy, they would sometimes have me go around the gameroom and do "crowd" control. Under the skee-ball game rows I would catch small kids under there. What they would be doing is beyond me, but I think they were trying to access the ticket stash. Also I would catch teenagers behind the games trying to get at the coins (sometimes the back doors would be left unlocked).
We had this one older guy go into a Stargate upright and destroy the particle board box to grab out the coin bucket. From across the arcade we heard a loud noise... hundreds of tokens all over the floor, as the guy stumbled and fell as he got out of the game. I would find phony coins and slugs with strings all the time, before we converted to tokens with unique grooves in them. Lots of mischief. The small "mom and pop" arcades that were at every other strip mall suffered from this.
We had people from Centuri (they were only 20 minutes away) drop by and check on their "test" games periodically. Track & Field was their money maker at the time. I remember them installing out new games into the floor, what a thrill it was. We received one called "astarax", which was there for awhile and poof a week later it just broke. Cool game with a "circle" for a monitor.
I was more a pinball guy, so biggest pinball moment was the release of High Speed. People were literally waiting in line to play it in our arcade. They had 2 sets of "Quads": 4 High Speeds back to back.
Incredible sights. I just wish I had a camera on me during those times.
