Wullie wrote:
I might be remembering wrong, but I think the Party Time over the road was a £2 play, one of the popular ones when they were "winning" definitely was anyway
For something so common & seemingly innocuous it's amazing the amount of damage gambling can cause. Though you could say the same about booze, drugs & even food I suppose
If it was £2 per play it won't have been that Party Time, the only machines that allowed £2 per play were the infamous 'Section 16' machines, which was quite one of the cheekiest and nastiest evils ever created by the gambling industry.
We're only going back six years or so here, but at the time the maximum permitted jackpot for arcade fruit machines was £25, with a maximum 30p stake. (With repeat chances and streaks, the 'real' jackpot was more like £100 (£25 + three repeats), but these were rare, and the price of play was capped at 30p.)
The 'industry' had been pushing for bigger jackpots and stakes for ages, but the regulator kept knocking them back.
So what did they come up with? Section 16.
These machines had a £500 jackpot at a price per spin of £2, except such a machine would have been illegal, so how did they get around it?
The machine had 20 winlines, each winline cost 10p to play, and the jackpot on each winline was £25. The industry argued that what the player was choosing to do was play twenty 10p games simultaneously, and that each 'individual game' had a jackpot of £25. If all twenty games were played at once and all came in together, 20x£25 gave the £500 jackpot, at £2 per spin. (It was possible to choose how many winlines to play, including 1 winline for 10p with a jackpot of £25, but no one ever actually did that, of course.)
And they fucking got away with it too.
The legislation was changed to outlaw S16, but not before a huge amount of damage had been done, there are absolute horror stories of people losing thousands and thousands of pounds in these things over the course of several sittings, as arcades fell over themselves to install row upon row of S16s.
People literally in the arcade first thing in the morning, to pick up where they left off the day before, and getting attendants to reserve machines for them whilst they cleaned out their bank accounts.
Also, S16 were random, not controlled/compensated, so they can and did take many thousands of pounds without ever paying anything close to a £500 jackpot. A lot of folks simply didn't understand that unlike the old £25 jackpot machines, there was no way to 'force' a random machine.
Truly hateful things, I never got much involved with them myself (worst I ever did was a £300 kicking one night IIRC, never to be repeated), but some folks basically lost their lives to them, jobs, family, house, the lot.