As a child of the 90’s, there is no question that my life was devoid of certain luxuries that are all but universal in certain parts of the world today. A tablet was something Indiana Jones might have dug out of the ground, Fortnite was a vocabulary word from Charles Dickens in English class, and Tik Tok was a sound made by my uncle’s creepy clock that kept me awake when I visited his house. Still, there is at least one thing that most kids today will never get to experience in the same way that we 90’s kids did: Arcades.
Nothing quite beat a warm summer day at the beach with my mother and grandmother. The sun, the fried dough, the cool water, and the rides came together nicely with our first stop: the arcade. My brother and I would receive $10 in quarters to split evenly and play games for as long as the money lasted us.
We would invariably start with an exciting match or two of with my grandmother of Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat. Nothing gets the summer adrenaline going like the threat of being hit with a devastating “Hadoken” attack by a fierce button-mashing relative!
Most of our quarters, however, were spent on games that generated tickets rather than pay-til-you-lose classic video games. Wikipedia even has an article for Redemption Games like this. Redemption games were games of skill that rewarded the player for achieving a certain score or outcome, and in our case, the reward was tickets.
Arcades today have cards or even apps for storing tickets, but back in the day, we collected physical tickets. Eventually, the arcade upgraded to allow for tickets to be redeemed in bulk for larger tickets (100’s) or even slips of paper, but these tickets were bone fide gold. They represented hours of work and pure arcade game mastery!
A little-known secret was that the arcade would let you trade in your tickets for higher value tickets to help you save up. 100 individual tickets could be redeemed for a larger ticket worth 100 make storage a bit easier.
My brother and I weren’t your average arcade goers though. We had a system, a system to generate as many tickets as possible for as few quarters as possible. This took dozens of trips to the arcade to master a variety of games, but the true secret often involved teamwork, a bit of math, and knowing the behavior of the arcade employees.
Here were some of our favorites, as well as some of the most ticket-profitable.
Wacky Gator
Teamwork was a must to whack as many of these gators as you could in the limited time you have. Two boys have four arms and quick reflexes, and the tickets came pouring out.
Feed Big Bertha
No, this isn’t something out of a Stephen King movie. Big Bertha was “hungry, hungry, hungry,” but so were we. With two people throwing plastic balls into her mouth, we could double our ticket output per quarter. Talk about efficiency!
Pokerino
You were supposed to roll the ball to try to get different winning poker hands, but imagine the possibilities if you had long skinny arms and the arcade employee wasn’t always the most attentive… a four of a kind or a royal flush just might happen to show up and generate tons of tickets. Is this cheating, or just using biology and oversight to your advantage? Only time will tell!
Ski Ball
Ski Ball was a win-win. My mother and grandmother loved playing and would often provide some extra quarters to play as a family. The added bonus? The family’s tickets were split between the two of us.
Our system did not stop with just maximizing the number of tickets earned per game. We wanted value for our hard work when it came to the prizes!
The arcade assumes that most children will redeem their tickets on the day they are earned. Ten dollars’ worth of games might generate 100 tickets to the average kid, so most of the inexpensive prizes were showcased in a glass display in the rear of the arcade. These prizes would range from a Tootsie Rolls for 2 tickets all the way up to a cheap plastic toy for maybe 200 tickets.
My brother and I had our eyes on something bigger: one of the “shelf prizes.”
These prizes were on display high above the glass counter on large shelves with huge tags representing the number of tickets needed to earn them: A skateboard for 3,000 tickets, a video game for 5,000, a new TV for 40,000. The arcade no doubt used these prizes to get kids to spend more money per visit with the illusion that they might hit a jackpot and take one home. The reality, of course, was that most kids aren’t great at saving would just redeem their tickets that day and never save up enough for a shelf prize.
Among the shelf prize treasures was the object we desired most: the lava lamp.
This decorative lamp consists of a special-colored wax mixture inside a glass vessel. When the wax is heated by a special light bulb, the warmed wax rises through the surrounding liquid, cools, loses its buoyancy, and falls back to the bottom of the vessel. Lava lamps were among the coolest objects a kid in grade school could display in his or her room, but we needed 4,000 tickets for this must-have.
The two of us pooled our tickets together and saved up for several years to earn our lava lamps. Even when we had enough tickets for one, we held off until we had enough tickets for two – one for each of us. It wouldn’t surprise me if we made 20+ trips to the arcade over the course of 6-7 years, but we were finally able to obtain our prizes one day. I don’t remember much about the purchase itself, other than the employee needing to give us one from the back and the one on display, saying something about how “people never actually buy prizes like this.”
If you’re wondering, yes, I still have it, and it’s picture at the top of this post.
I’ll leave the parenting advice to the bloggers who are parents. However, in the light of this being a personal finance and happiness blog, I did want to share this story in that light (pun somewhat intended). If you see your kids developing potentially good personal finances habits, like delaying gratification by saving up tickets at the arcade, consider doing everything in your means to foster those habits. My mother and grandmother could have just as easily made us use our tickets each visit to avoid the hassle of storing them until the next time. Instead, they helped us accumulate tickets over many years and thereby achieve this “financial” goal of ours at a young age. I found it helped me learn about the value of planning ahead, saving up for something you want, appreciating trade-offs, and exploring how to satisfy my needs given constraints in their resources.
They helped me become a “Lava Lamp Kid,” and other kids have the opportunity to become one too.
