Free Money
When I was a kid, video games were all the rage. Yes, I know... They're all the rage today, too. But I mean arcade games. The stand-up machines that stood upright and important, covered with bright designs, quarters disappearing into them like ants marching into a hole. The old school games were what we played: Pac-Man, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Galaxians, and a fair number of more forgettable games.
Nowadays, looking at the games, whether home or arcade, with their 6-button simultaneous triple joystick and foot-pedal action, I sometimes long for those simpler days. The days when you could drop a quarter in a game, grab a joystick or poise your fingers over a couple of buttons and disappear into the action for a few minutes (or hours if you were good). I liked pinball too, but it had the feel of an older, analog generation. My friends and I were already spending a couple nights every month staying up all night coding, and the new digital technology was only bounded by our imagination.
The worst thing about the games was that they cost money. And as a poor kid much too young to have a job, this was the basic crux upon which our daily routines hinged. Granted, one or the other of us would ususally be able to scrounge a dollar or two off of our parents, but at twenty-five cents per game, that just didn't go very far at all. I don't remember who discovered "the trick", I only know that me and my friends were the only ones who knew and used it. Not only was it a way to let us play video games as much as we wanted (as long as we didn't mind playing the same one), but it became a source of revenue as well.
Growing up poor in Santa Fe was hard on a kid. After all, every day we would go downtown after school and see the wealthy tourists making their way around quaint, historical, over-priced Santa Fe. We hated them, because they represented the reason that our parents worked in restaurants and construction companies and tiny offices while their children jetted in for the ski season from Europe. It got to the point where we attempted to take advantage of them. We always had plans: selling fake maps to the city, parking their cars at the cheaper hotels without valets, and the like. But the only one we actually implemented was based on the trick.
I suppose I ought to explain the trick; it was actually two neat hacks that allowed us to get free and/or really inexpensive games. I still wonder what enterprising soul discovered them, and how they made their way to the backwater of a Santa Fe junior high school - to be adopted by a gang of hooligans like ourselves. Out of all our neat tricks: numbers that caused pay phones to call themselves, the proper type of soda machine that could be bullied into giving us free sodas, these were the best.
The first trick really only worked on one type of machine: Pac-Man. Occasionally we could get it to work on Galaxian, but never with any surety. It was simple enough. Grab a small rock, and rap sharply on the coin box of the machine just a few inches above and to the side of the coin slot. Voila. Free credit. The only problem with this was that if you banged too hard, you would cause the machine to reboot, losing all your hard-earned credits. You could also, if skilled enough, perform the trick with your knee, or the sole of your foot with a casual backwards kick. Needless to say, we were all very, very good at Pac-Man.
The second trick worked on a number of machines: Galaxian, Defender, and (as we later discovered) Ms. Pac-Man. Basically, it would work on any machine that used a specific type of cabinet, and as later games were repackaged into older cases, we were able to successfully reuse the trick. This trick, unlike the rock-slamming brutality of the previous one, required a delicate touch; it had to be finessed. To begin, you would take a penny and stick it up into the coin return slot. Up inside the two-finger wide slot, there were two thin metal plates. What you had to do was stick the penny up in between the plates, and then press it firmly against the side of the coin slot, like inserting a book between the mattress of a bed and pressing it against the headboard. If pressed exactly right and then released suddenly, you could ricochet the penny up into the machine where it would trigger the credit mechanism, giving you a free game.
The key here is that we would use these tricks over and over and over, generating massive quantities of credits on the machines. Then, once we finished playing, it was time to sell off our ill-gotten virtual gains. We would scour the crowd for a young, but rich-looking kid. "Hey, you like Pac-Man?" we'd ask.
"Sure," he'd invariably say.
"Well, here's the deal, man. My father gave me a bunch of money and I was playing Pac-Man, but it wasn't registering my credits. I put in like two bucks, and I'm going to have to go soon, and I have all these credits on the machine, and the manager won't refund my money. I'll tell you what..."
The kid would smile, sensing the sell. "What?"
"I'll sell you all these games for a buck. I want to get a coke, and since the manager won't give me my money back, I'll give them all to you for just a buck."
It usually worked, and then my friends and I would walk off down the street, sharing a coke that we had bought with our "free" money.
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