Wild stories from those who were employed at an arcade.

sabrewulf69

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An aquatince of mine who use to have a small arcade (3 or 4 machines) in the back of his flea market was telling me a kinda funny (but kinda sad... in a dumb way) story. I talked to him for the first time in a few years the other day and asked him why he no longer had the arcade machines in the back (I bought a few from him before.) He proceded to tell me about how one day one of the vendors in his flea market said they heard cursing and loud banging in the back, so he went to the back and noticed one of the guns from his Carnevil was hanging down. As he walked closer he noticed it wasn't just hanging down it was broken in half. Very confused he went to check the security camera and saw a guy playing it for just a few minutes before yelling "MOTHER F@@KER!!" and repeatedly bashing the gun against the control panel until it broke and walking away pissed. He said he called the police but when they arrived they acted like they really couldn't be bothered and he never heard back from them. He then said since he wasn't really making any money on them anyway that he decided to just sell them all as is and rent the space out instead.

So I wanted to here from all of you guys who have actually worked around an arcade, what is the wildest or funniest things you saw in your time there?
 
Oh man, if only that footage was still available. I love a good rage quit.
Yeah I'd loved to have seen it myself lol. Hate that for the Carnevil though, it was one of my childhood favorites at my local mall arcade. I also hope it was one of the orange guns and not one of the green or purple ones that seem to be harder to find lol.
 
Sega should have put a taser wire inside the guns, so when you smashed the gun into pieces it would shock the hell out of you.

I would watch that video!

:p
 
Perhaps not terribly interesting since it's modern arcades, but...

A kid got stuck inside one of these "cut the string" machines. I was working a shift, and the prize was won, so I turned the machine off, locked the door and left it.

I come back the next day and apparently just after I left some kids older brother had put him in there and left him in there. There's an "emergency escape" type button in them (you can see it on the floor in the corner) but trying to get a hysterical kid to press it is a job in itself.

After this I investigated and turns out the lock doesn't engage properly if there isn't a prize inside (regardless of if it's on/off). You close the door to lock it, then you can just push it in further (on the circled parts) to disengage the lock and it'll open. I thiiiiink it was perhaps a bit more complex but I genuinely don't remember. Still, with some fiddling around it was easy to open.

It's morbid but I found (and still do find) the entire situation hilarious.

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Also these two people who won a ridiculous amount of tickets. I literally refilled the orange machine they're standing next to 2-3 times in one shift, it was insanely easy to empty out of tickets with minimal spending. So they had several bulk/wholesale "rounds" of tickets.

I want to estimate there's about 50k tickets in that pile which would have brought basically our entire prize shop.

They then started emptying out the gamblers.


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