First time poster so firstly hi!
As a young boy in the nineties, I used to love going to the Working Men’s Club with my Dad…mainly so he could play on what I remember as Club Lucky Strike and shoot for £100 on a 10p stake! We always used to holiday at the seaside, and the best part of the day was the hour I’d spend in the arcades after tea.
There was such a wide range of machines back then that I look back and reminisce fondly when I see arcades nowadays.
– trying to get into the centre on Pot of Gold
– cottoning on that three holds guarantees a win
– realising that holding all three reels when you’ve 2 guarantees you a bonus and trying to explain it to your Dad (!)
– collecting each feature to see what it did on a new machine
– the first time you realise cancel slows the light down!
Nowadays in arcades at the seaside, there are rarely any fruit machines – and what there are largely don’t work. I can only imagine when the last slots were made that are designed as 5p/10p £5 JP – the only new slots in arcades now are token only payout. I guess that the shift has been due to trying to keep kids away with gambling – but the token machines in my view are worse. At least I know what £5 would buy me, 300 tokens in some arcades won’t get a kid a bag of Haribo.
Good times!