One of my very first jobs was working at Milpitas Golfland, an arcade in the Bay Area. Time to relive and record some memories… This was originally posted several years ago on The New Gamer and is reposted here for posterity

I hate ticket games. They are annoying, loud, and they break all the time. Please, people constantly tried to cheat and steal to get prizes!

Don’t they realize that the stuff is crap!? Most of the value of that quarter you drop is paying for the gamble. But whether it’s a simple as walking up the Skee Ball ramp and dropping the balls in the 100 point ring or as sly as attempting to turn in a brick of unfed tickets in as legit winnings, people can’t seem to help themselves. (Translation: A ‘brick’ is 1000 tickets. You can tell they aren’t legit if they don’t have the little teeth marks they get from being fed through the ticket slot: a smooth ticket is a stolen ticket).

Tickets were also responsible for the the worst job at the arcade: being the dude at the redemption counter. Ugh. (And this was a job where we also had to clean up the restrooms – ticket redemption was worse.)

“Okay kid, you got 7,398 tickets. You can get anything from this here Dancing Cactus and down.”

This kid looks around and sees something. A little plastic foot. This foot is junk. It was just a piece of transparent, colored plastic cut in the shape of a foot. It wasn’t 3D. It wasn’t sticky. It wasn’t big. It didn’t glow in the dark. It was manufactured to be lost five seconds after you owned it. It did have a hole punched in it, so I guess you could make a shitty necklace? We had it so that people have something to do with their last ticket. It’s the ceramic dog of Golfland.

“Oooh! I want a foot!”

Great. “You have 7,397 tickets.”

I hate ticket games.

arcade Golfland Good ol' days skee ball ticket games