alt Hacker News> or literal slot machines
While I agree with the description of "kid-friendly casino", the big thing distinguishing "literal slot machines" to me is that they pay out in tokens. Any machine at Chuck E. Cheese would pay out in tickets.* That means you go in with X tokens, come out with Y tickets, and can't feed the tickets back into the machine. Instead, you get a plastic ring with a spider on it.
But you do get something; with a slot machine, you're guaranteed to end up with nothing.
* Actually, I think there was some kind of shelves-and-pushers machine where the goal was to somehow trigger the mechanism to shove a bunch of tokens off a shelf. This was not popular.
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There was one in the local mall briefly. While it was filled with quarters, when the coins dropped it released aluminium tokens from another source that were exchanged at the rate of 5 paper prize tickets.
In port huron michigan at the birchwood mall that shelf was full of quarters!!
There was an article in the JR cookbook / anarchist cookbook about how to win these games I i remember correctly. Could never pull it off as a 10 yo that neened my parents to drive me there