6 Weird Realities Of The Underground Arcade Gaming Industry

"There was one year where I went through almost 100 iPads," Michael said. "Two a week, during a period of about seven months. I found out after the fact that me and one other person at my location were responsible for about one-third of the game's advantage play across the country. Crazy when you think about it."

Jesus. If TV has taught us anything, it's that there are probably Dave & Buster's themed hitmen after him right now, their orange and blue camo doing them absolutely no favors ...

There is a shocking list of things we would do to make $50 an hour. The most appetizing by far is play video games.

But doesn't winning at games take skill and lightning-fast reflexes? Sure, but that's not as dire as you might think. Here's a video of Michael demonstrating his prowess:

In the video, Michael is playing Kung Fu Panda Dojo Mojo, a game where you have to smash the controllers according to what appears on the screen. The first thing that an advantage player will notice is that there are patterns to what controller you have to hit in each stage. They're fairly simple to figure out.

The next important thing is the bonus round, where you have to get 33 to 35 points to win. But what Michael figured out is that after a certain amount of plays, whether or not there's a winner, the difficulty of the bonus round drops until you need only, say, 25 points to win. That's the kind of mathematical advantage a skilled advantage player can really take ... uh ... advantage of. Sorry, we wrote ourselves into a corner there.

Michael says: "Most game companies (the good manufacturers, anyway) will put the manuals for their games online freely, for anyone to download. You can tell the inner-workings of many games this way, including whether or not a game can be set to be unwinnable for a certain number of plays, or if the game adheres to a set percentage. ... Anytime I'm suspicious of a game having an unwinnable mode [where you'll always lose for a number of plays, no matter what you do], I'll immediately look up the manual."

For most people, those manuals wouldn't really mean anything, but for advantage players, they are basically the machine's private diaries detailing all of its turn-ons and turn-offs (literally). For example, check out the online manual for Spin-N-Win, a pretty straightforward game where you hit a button to stop an electronic wheel in the hopes of landing on the Jackpot.

"I got the manual for Spin-N-Win. ... It showed that the timeframe the jackpot window can be set to is between 2 and 20 milliseconds, with a factory default of 5, but more importantly, it DID NOT have a setting for 'games until next win.' This had me playing the game consistently because it would never be 'due' for a jackpot, unlike Stacker or Tippin' Bloks, where the difficulty drops significantly every few hundred games or so, making it much easier to win."

But if you don't want to wait that long, you can always hire an advantage player to win some tickets for you, like the least sexy mercenary possible.

"I'm far more likely to play for someone on a game I either don't think I was getting another jackpot out of as is, or a game that doesn't have an unwinnable mode. I will very rarely play pro bono for someone. Sob stories ('It's my kid's birthday,' etc.) don't work on me, but if I've already cleared 100,000 tickets on the day, I may do some charity work on the way out of D&B."

Usually, Michael asks for a 50-50 ticket split, but with the introduction of cards for collecting points instead of tickets, that's become more difficult as of late.

In those cases, Michael can sometimes be persuaded to work for booze. "If someone agrees to buy me a Million Dollar Margarita, which typically rings $10 to $11 after tip, I win them about 2,500 to 3,000 worth of tickets on their card without taking a cut of the proceeds. If someone's willing to buy me a second drink, then I'll carry on with another 3,000-plus worth of tickets. I'm not paying $11 for a mixed drink in public, but if someone else is willing, all the better."

Wow, that sounds like a terrible remake of Seven Samurai.

We're tempted to think of these prize-based arcades like casinos, and advantage players like card counters. So does Dave & Buster's security eventually drag Michael to the basement and smack him around for "stealing" from the establishment? Nope!

"Despite my success and that of people like me, we're simply a drop in the bucket. Dave & Buster's are still making money long-term; advantage players are not that much of an impact on their bottom line," Michael explains.

"In talks with the higher-ups of their arcade operations, they've told me that they're completely fine with advantage players, but getting other employees to adopt that mindset is difficult at times. To be fair, the places I frequent have staff who are very good sports about keeping the games set to standard and keeping them in working order."

Though, surely there's a corrupt Dave & Buster's somewhere out there, with rigged machines and the much sadder equivalent of De Niro and Pesci in Casino, right? Maybe not, because ...

The advantage community and Dave & Buster's have an unspoken understanding of sorts. The company won't crank up their games' difficulty or set them to pay out a hilariously small amount of tickets, and advantage players agree not to gang up on one location and clean it out on a daily basis. This, however, can be achieved only by the players constantly keeping tabs on one another.

"I run the Dave & Buster's subreddit where players all across the country check in and update everyone on happenings at D&B," Michael told us. "It lets everyone touch base with local APs and ensure that the least number of people are playing key games ... If too many players swarm a key game, it will pay out more than it takes in, and D&B will (understandably) have to alter the game's settings or payouts."

There are also other rules that advantage players must observe. According to Michael: "AP rules: no under-pricing one another on eBay when you're selling stuff. That's just bad form. ... When there's a limited number of machines to advantage play on and more APs that want to play it, each player should be taking turns playing the same amount of credits. Another big rule would probably be: Don't cheat on the games. You should be making a profit playing legitimately."

We assume the "or else" at the end of that last sentence was heavily implied.

Michael Lucas is an advantage player and Mewtwo fanatic. Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a Cracked columnist, interviewer, and editor. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com.

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