Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

It was a dollar per try, and I shoved in 5 bucks. By the 4th try it was NOTICEABLE that if you press the button at the "right time", there was a lag before it overshot it and you failed. I pretty much could guess that something like the article discusses was at work, and was simply more a game of luck.

Obviously I stopped after that, as a pure luck game is not as fun. If I had known that the default was 700 losses before payout as a default, I would have had a nice drink or 3 and counted the many people that tried it throughout the day

As a side note, saw one winner at the machine get a wrapped stack of 500, 1 dollar bills

https://youtu.be/vXBfwgwT1nQ

Guy builds a robot to time pressing the button to get the light to land on the winning sections and demonstrates it is not skill but a random number generator.

There were a few jurisdictions, Iowa and New Jersey come to mind, that were already aware of the nature of these machines and required the manufacturers to have their software audited and validated by (state approved) third-party gaming labs identical to what the slot machine companies do when getting code approved for release.

The key point was that the probability of a win couldn't be adjusted on the fly to make the target payout percentage (kind of what the article says). The probabilities had to be fixed for every player on every game. Although the first method is a lot easier to write, software-wise. =)

For the rest of the jurisdictions, the default payout was 40% and anything was fair game to hit that number. Remember that the next time you're in a Chuck E Cheese.