Previous arcade employment

[tronads]

Inspired by another thread, I was wondering if anyone else here had any arcade employment back in the day.

Circa 1988-1900 I worked for F Peeney & Sons, who owned a number of Blackpool arcades, namely Coin Castle, Purple Penny, Sportland, Carousel and Lucky Star. I did mostly weekends and evenings and holiday periods as I was at college studying electronics at the time.

As much as I pleaded to work in the workshop doing repairs, they were having none of it, and I was just a general dogsbody floor attendant, and it was really sh1t....the staff were treated appallingly and expected to work frequent double shifts for a pittance really. We also had to deal with the local scroats breaking into machines etc, which was particularly unpleasant, though I quickly learnt that I needed to pretend to befriend them in order to not get beat up when I left work. Highlight of the job was fixing a pool table blockage for a really fit blonde lass from Emmerdale Farm...Malandra Burrows.

In addition to that, around 1990 I also did some work for PlayerAppeal Automatics, which was a Blackpool Single Site Operator, and this was much better, as it was a friends dad's company. Here I went out on deliveries of cabs and fruits to local hotels and cafes, and also worked on game repairs, which was much more fulfilling.

Anyone else work in the industry back in the day ?

 

[jengineer]

I used to go on deliveries and call-outs for my dad from being about 8 yrs old, I remember around 1986 to 1990 going to various youth clubs/pubs around cheshire exchanging/repairing jamma machines and then playing them to 'test them' also swapping jamma games in my dads workshop and playing Gladiator, vigilante, pocket gal, Wonderboy, endless football champ bootlegs, a jamma'd megadrive which was fun to play and loads more, playing Gorgar pinball machines in my lounge around 1988, playing Chase HQ and Outrun machines on my driveway under the carport because the workshop was rammed, been brought up around machines from being a baby so kinda got used to it, my mates used to come round and get all excited because there was a Megatech on the driveway but all I really wanted to do was climb trees and go fishing, I did like going out all day with my dad though, going from pub to pub and having fish and chips for dinner etc
jengineer2014-09-15 10:35:09

 

[woody]

1987-1990 worked for mam inn play as a engineer working on video cab, slots, pins and jukeboxes

 

[uberpixel]

I used to work for Bass Leisure back in 1996-1998. They had a massive site in NW London called The Edge which was essentially an arcade with an internet cafe in the middle.

I worked in the internet cafe but had mates who worked as engineers on all the arcade machines that were there.

We had a full size Ridge Racer too.

 

[RGP]

Although i didn't work in them, it was a job i would have died for back then but i've heard similar stories off people i've met about maltreatment of staff, territorial engineers scared crudless that somebody better might come along and take their job, i saw a manager drag a 16/17 year old by the ear and neck to a back room once for trying to pry his way into a coin box, one of his mates tried to block and got a swift kick in the nuts, there were some places that were like the wild west.

I've spoken to an ex tech who confirmed a lot of dedicated cabs got parts raped and then smashed up, the ones that smashed them regretted it when the Street Fighter era came as they had to buy new instead of convert but the initial coin drop was so massive they didn't care, it was 1979 Space Invaders all over again but as he said, the manufacturers realised they were losing out on service and repair fees so made it harder to fix boards by putting out less schematics or licensing the schematics to a very few operators. Corporate greed started earlier than we think.

This tech is in his 70's now and saw a lot of stuff happen, learnt monitor repair the hard way (fix it or you're no use) and came from a mechanical background, amoked way too much, got too many shocks to count and had very little help from other techs, it was like a dark secret time where knowledge really was power, a broken game somewhere else is a lack of profit for them and more money in our coin drop.

Thats just one persons perspective on it, it might not have been true of every operator or supplier.