Beating 5 Scam Arcade Games with Science

this is me entering an arcade wearing just your normal everyday backpack only technically it's not your normal everyday backpack because when i set it here and then nonchalantly load a few balls into the water bottle then it plays the game like a good robot should and i win all the tickets and that's pretty cool but what if i told you i made similar backpacks not just for skee-ball but for this game and this one basically coming up with contraptions to absolutely dominate 5 of the most common arcade games including some hacks that cost less than a dollar and actually work to set world record ticket payouts but we also secretly recorded data from a bunch of different arcades so i'll teach you the strategies to beat the games that give out the most tickets along with showing you the five games we discovered are actual scams don't ever set foot in another arcade again until you've watched this video in its entirety let's get started [Music] now admittedly the genesis for this video came when i was using my over-engineered bowling ball that i could control just by leaning because i thought what if i took that same concept and applied it to mini golf and while that idea could be really useful for getting a good golf score just no real payoff for my efforts which focused my attention to the holy grail of any mini golf course the arcade it was time to recoup all the allowance money i've lost as a kid starting first with skee-ball and before we really see it in action let me first explain how it works because if you take away the backpack you'll find a frankenstein version of a softball pitching machine that we chopped up and modified so it runs just off batteries then there's a solenoid here that makes sure the ski balls get released one at a time so if you just turn it on then we put a ball in here it fires the ball like this the coolest part here though is when it's placed in the backpack you roll this pocket up to reveal the ball exit and then place this water bottle here as a clever disguise to load up to three balls at a time now of course if you don't have a secret robot backpack here's how you win this game as a mere human for starters if you watch the pros play yes there are skeeball pros they actually aim for the 4 000 point hole this actually makes sense because even if your throw is a little too weak or a little too strong you're still getting significant points a common mistake is to take the bait and go all or nothing by aiming for the small 10 000 point hole in the corner the pros name for this only in desperate situations where they're behind and they need big points to make a comeback for the win the other big tip is to brace your leg against the base of the machine in the same spot each time and then try and only move your arm which will make your throws more repeatable and accurate because you're reducing the variables that could lead to air so if you want to win just follow these tips and practice a bunch or you could just go with my route [Music] so then when you're all done dominating or if you think one of the workers might be getting suspicious you can just pick up the backpack at any point and walk away with a bunch of tickets on your card up next is one of my personal favorites basketball in this case the backpack is being used just to smuggle the special mechanism inside because of the untrained eye this is just a normal basketball when in fact it's a robot in disguise now before i show you exactly how it works you first need to understand how these games work just underneath each rim is an infrared laser and a detector and then on the front of the rim on the other side of that metal plate is a reflector so when the laser beam shines straight forward it bounces off the reflector and then the sensor is like yep i can see the beam so when a ball goes through the hoop it breaks the beam and the sensor's like aha i didn't see it for a second at which point it tells the game to add two points to your total because that means you must have scored in engineering we call this a beam break detector and it's the exact same concept you have as a safety feature on your garage door so if you really want to destroy the high score here the ball needs to break the beam then somehow get out of the way so the beam reconnects and then come back and break the beam again over and over again as fast as possible but if you think about it the whole ball doesn't need to actually get out of the way just the part in front of the beam itself and how might you do that well one way is to 3d print the bottom hemisphere of a basketball in two parts attached together through some linear guide rods then add a battery microcontroller and servo motor so the bottom part of the shell can translate up and down this way you would reconnect the beam and then break it over and over again and register two points every time that happened now you just need a way to grab the rim so you can hang out there while you perform these shenanigans and if you have some pneumatic pistons connected to a mini pressure intake controlled by a solenoid valve triggered by an rf remote then you could shoot the ball normally and then with one push of a button piston rods would shoot out and grab the rim and then once mischief was managed you trigger the remote again and they would retract now if you just add another 3d printed hemisphere on top then glue on the actual basketball skin and when you put it all together it would look something like this now if you don't happen to have a robo ball here's a few tips that will help you get the high score for this game now the most important thing is you never want to waste time waiting for a ball to roll down to you and since these games normally come in pairs just swipe your card on both games and then temporarily borrow the second set of balls now this should give you plenty more than you need so just keep the balls that are the least inflated now you start the game and get into a rhythm where you finish your shot with one hand and then start grabbing a replacement ball with your other hand before your first shot has even gone in or if the rim is close and you want to get really extreme you can just go with a two-handed shooting strategy like this guy but even that strategy is no match for my spherical transformer because when i'm ready to go i just shoot the ball with one hand and then hit the remote right as it's about to go in and now as the ball just sits there articulating i simply watch those sweet sweet points rack themselves right on up [Music] and then as soon as time's up i just hit the remote again and the piston rods are tracked and while no one's the wiser i've now engineered my way to a butt load of tickets and a new lifetime high score next up is a really popular game called quick drop where you hit this button to release these ping pong balls at the right moment and if you get all 50 ping pong balls into the buckets within the 22 seconds allotted without missing any shots then you hit the mega jackpot but the thing is to get all 50 balls in before the time runs out there's essentially no margin for human air which is good news for me because robot backpacks don't make human errors now you notice when i walk up i can just set the backpack down and it self registers right in place the trick here is we 3d printed an exact negative replica of the button housing on the game and this piston rod that pokes through and pushes the button on the game is attached to the solenoid that's controlled by this arduino microcontroller and it tells it the exact timing needed to beat the game now if you're trying this on your own here's what you need to know to successfully do this in 22 seconds you have to drop four balls in each bucket except in two buckets you've gotta drop five now dropping five into these two buckets isn't impossible but the timing's so tight it's really hard to pull off without them hitting the rim and bouncing out now the jackpot starts at 500 tickets and every time someone loses it goes up by two tickets and each time that happens the game gives you just a little more total time on the clock and so if you ever see the jackpot at more than 625 tickets enough time is now on the clock where you only need four balls per bucket to win and it's definitely worth trying it a few times because that makes it so much easier to pull off alternatively if you're too impatient to wait for the jackpot to rise up you can just go to school for six years to get a degree in mechanical engineering and do it this way [Music] and then even as all 554 sweet delicious tickets are being added to your account you can just inconspicuously walk away with your backpack in tow for our next game we've got the perennial arcade favorite air hockey now this is the most complicated of all the builds because if you look closely here at the top there's a hole in the bag for a camera to look out through then stripping away the backpack you can see that camera connects to the brains and in this case it's a raspberry pi which is basically like a mini computer instead of just an arduino microcontroller like all the other builds have used so far the reason this one needs a bit more brain power is because it uses computer vision to track the puck and based off the trajectory it makes a prediction then sends instructions to rotate this servo which is attached to an arm that moves the paddle and protects the goal and perhaps my favorite part of this build is that it obviously won't work if the whole thing is sliding and moving all around so we need to anchor it down securely into position but we need to do that quickly and discreetly our solution here is a pair of neodymium toggle magnets so if you simply turn both of these knobs the rare earth magnets move into position and anchor it to the steel frame of the air hockey table and it's basically cemented in place as you can see here as for the human strategy here playing air hockey might seem like total chaos but there are four simple tricks that will pretty much guarantee you can beat any casual player the first is to hold the paddle like this and not like this doing that allows you to really whip the paddle around and gain extra speed on your shots the second is that for your default defensive position you want your paddle to be out here not right up against the goal right here that's because this cuts down the angle and you only have to move the paddle back and forth this far to protect the whole goal versus back and forth this far if you're against the edge this is the same reason goalies will come out of the goal if there's a breakaway in soccer even for a bing shot you now just have to move the paddle a small distance diagonally back like this so your paddle should essentially always stay inside a triangle like this when you're playing defense and when you watch professionals play yes there are air hockey professionals you will see them employ both these first two tips the third trick you'll also see is they try and play for possession you want to try and cushion your opponent's shot and gain possession of the puck so you can set up your own shot which leads to the last tip mix up the straight shots and bang shots but try and practice at least one trick shot like this one where you hit the puck down into the corner and then when it rebounds back to you you hit the bank shot for the win here's what that looks like in action now the real benefit of my backpack system is you can be playing your opponent but then when you get a phone call or you have to attend to some other important matters your goal is in safe hands [Music] and then at your own leisure you can eventually just come back and finish things off then with the victory securely in hand you just disengage the two toggle magnets with a twist and you're good to go and finally we've got the ultimate test of strength the punching bag game now for this one to make it more interesting i wanted to find and challenge the guy in the arcade whose muscles look the least like mine so i stepped up first and rocked the 678 out of a possible 999 but then he stepped up and rocked an 877 and since that's bigger than 678 the trash talking commenced baby if you spend a little less time at the computer a little more time in the weight room so that was disappointing but lucky for me i had a trick up my sleeve like actually because that's a fake arm in order to disguise this it's basically a bionic punching arm powered by two spring-loaded pistons to set the springs we use a threaded rod and a drill and once under tension they're held in place with a quick release mechanism i can trigger with my finger at the exact moment i want to punch a thing and i would classify the initial test in the lab as [Music] encouraging it's important to note to play by the rules for this game there's no side punching pushing running kicking or head butting but you'll notice there's no rule against spring-loaded piston punching gloves so now that my moment of sheer domination had arrived i stepped up and rockton 838 which was less than 877 which was disappointing and in hindsight i should have known it's really hard to compete with the human body in terms of things like punching and throwing because we're just so efficient with those mechanics and i have to sacrifice a lot of the speed and momentum of my own arm body system when i'm wearing that heavy wrist mounted puncher but you know what i'm a fighter and what i lack in muscle mass i make up for in tenacity so out of curiosity i took a closer look to see how the machine actually works and it turns out it has a beam brake sensor just like the basketball game so as that odd shaped metal piece which is attached to the axle and punching bag rotates around the beam has this tiny window to hit the sensor you can see the sensor in the front view here so the game cleverly measures how many milliseconds the sensor sees the beam for and from that it infers how quickly the bag is rotating on the axle and therefore how hard it was punched and this gave me an idea so i went to the prize counter and redeemed a few of my jackpot tickets i'd been stocking up in exchange for a pez dispenser step one was to unwrap and eat some of the pez cause they're just delicious and then for step two i removed the head and cut the arcade card like this and then taped it here and then went and tracked down my new friend my theory was that if i extended the pez dispenser and modified card out like this and then let go the force of the spring would retract the card and it would break the beam so fast the machine would think it was an insanely fast punch but would it actually work and it turns out it absolutely does because i maxed out the machine so uh yeah use this information responsibly kids now a few years ago i made a video where i visited the carnival and collected data on all the games and then used physics to expose which carnival games were rigged and then showed how to beat them so this time around instead of the carnival i once again bribed some family friends with unlimited slurpees in exchange for them collecting a bunch of data at some local arcades and in addition to uncovering which games were scams which i'll cover in just a minute here's what we discovered for starters the most popular games in the arcade were the redemption games as opposed to the experience games and here's what i mean by that redemption games are the games where the goal is to win tickets so like the coin pushers or this plinko game or spin the wheel on the other end of the spectrum you have experience games like air hockey skee-ball or racing games it's a trade-off because the games on this side of the spectrum give out more tickets but it's not as much about the fun of the experience and then in the middle of the spectrum you have games like the ping pong drop or hit the clown that have middle of the road ticket payouts but they're also middle of the road fun to play now since the games on this side were a lot more popular they earn a lot more money for the arcade even when you factor in the higher ticket paths we found that for a medium-sized arcade on a busy day the less popular games were played 25 times and the more popular ones could be played up to 250 times or more at an average gameplay of one dollar that means each game makes 25 to 250 dollars per day or about seven to seventy thousand dollars per year and finally we found that if your sole goal is to win tickets coin pusher games like this avengers one seem to be the best return on investment but honestly you can just ask one of the workers there who are hanging out making minimum wage and are probably pretty chill cause chances are they'll just tell you which ones they regularly see pay out the best alright so finally let's get to the real juicy part and talk about which games we discovered were basically scams now i actually have some experience in this area because a few years back i built my original backpack arcade robot to dominate this game basically would sense the light turning on a few lights in front of the jackpot light then it would hit the button with sub millisecond precision and then we would touch nothing in between runs and yet it would alternate between missing both short and long in other words the timing on the jackpot light doesn't match up with the duration it's lit and it's very different from all the other lights you can actually test this yourself by picking a random light and you'll find miraculously you could somehow hit that random light every single time you try now this caused me to dig a little deeper and after a bit of research i was able to locate a copy of the owner's manual at which point i discovered the arcade owner could just manually set how often a jackpot should be won so this time around i was curious what other games were essentially running the same scam where you think it's a game of skill but in reality the arcade owner is controlling when a jackpots won and as it turns out this really popular game called stacker employs the same trick this other really popular game keymaster and this cut the rope game are also in fact running the same scam in all three cases i was able to get a hold of a copy of their owner's manual and each one has some language around how the arcade owner can specify how often a jackpot occurs i also found many but not all claw machines have language around how it will close with full strength but then back off to a much weaker strength of whatever is set by the owner for this reason it's best to try for prices closest to the exit hole to minimize the amount of time it's held in the claws and i call these games scams because they present themselves as winnable games of skill when in reality it's essentially a random dice roll that is heavily stacked against you and just like at the carnival the most lucrative games are those where people overestimate their chances of winning because they seem to get close but they don't quite win in gambling psychology this is known as the near-miss effect and it will lead to increased play of the slot machine but this is much worse than a slot machine because at least in that case you know it doesn't matter how you pull the lever because it's random chance and on top of that those games are regulated so there is a minimum payout required by law so for every dollar for example put into a slot machine they have to pay out at least 80 cents back to the players but for those scam arcade games i just mentioned the default payout rate is on average 20 cents for every dollar you spend but a shady arcade owner could basically set that to zero and no one would know and that would be perfectly legal and that's especially messed up because it's primarily played by kids so if you remember nothing else just try and pick games that avoid any sort of digital winning element that can be rigged because in those cases you just never really know what your chances are these games however are all great options to at least have a better sense of your actual odds of winning i've checked the manual for all of these and what you see is exactly what you get and i can vouch some arcades are more fair about this than others for example my home arcade here refuses to carry any of the games that can be rigged against you which i think is pretty cool however if they happen to see this my only suggestion is that moving forward they should probably institute no backpacks allowed policy and perhaps also don't let people redeem tickets for pez dispensers this is a dad finder it was made by a dad who is also a pilot so his kids always know which direction and how far away he is when he's traveling around the world and this contraption feeds your dog with the pull of a lever and went on to get successfully funded as a six-figure kickstarter campaign so what do these and tens of thousands of more projects just like them have in common well they were all designed by folks who took my creative engineering class at studio.com the best part about being a maker and an engineer is you can come up with clever solutions for your real life challenges like winning more tickets at the arcade it's like a super power but it's a super power you can learn and i love to see others catch that spark which is why a few times a year i teach a month-long creative engineering course and enrollment for the latest session is open right now now you might be like hold up mark didn't you just launch the crunch labs build box that monthly toy that gets delivered to a kid where you build it together with them on video and then explore all the juicy physics that make it work why are you now back to talking about this class and it's like yeah i did but the problem is that we sold out of the certified butt ton of subscriptions we had in stock in like less than a week so i don't really want to talk about that until we have more in stock which will for sure happen in time for the holidays so if you want to guarantee you get dibs on one for christmas before we sell out again you better get yourself on the wait list at crunchlabs.com asap and now you might be thinking all right but what's the difference between the box and your class and the answer is the crunch lab's monthly build box is sort of the first step it's a monthly build i walk you through where i teach you to think like an engineer so if you're teenager-ish all the way down to way younger it's perfect for you you gotta get on that wait list but if you're teenager-ish all the way up to way older the creative engineering class is perfect for you because the class is more open-ended and it covers my full engineering design process all the way from how i come up with an idea to prototyping to finalizing the build and then giving it character i show you everything that i'm thinking everything that i'm doing and i do it three times over the course of a month you're gonna watch me design and create three totally original builds and i'm gonna guide you through finishing three creative builds of your own and this is an online class so you can take it from anywhere and work it around your schedule but it's fully immersive and intensive so whether you're working professional a complete beginner or an experienced engineer this class has been designed to meet you wherever you're at and then level up your skills so go to studio.com grover or use the link in the video description to see what other people had to say about their experience and then enroll and i'll see you in class thanks for watching [Applause]

Channel: Mark Rober

Views: 41,879,396

Keywords:

Id: Rsxao9ptdmI

Length: 20min 31sec (1231 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022

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[u/jasestu]

This is pretty lame for a Rober video. So much less on the engineering than and build than usual. Guess the almighty algorithm is driving him to the same generic style as the rest of the high ranking crap on the platform.

[u/llv77]

Lame video, only raises questions, gives no answers. How does the first invention work? Is it blind? Does anybody know?

[u/SentientOrangeFanta]

mf built a Fallout Power Fist

[u/nnoobb]

The thumbnail looked like the guy pointed a gun at Spiderman's head.

[u/Devil_Dan83]

I kinda love that cheating the sensor was more effective than building a whole Fallout power fist. With the manuals it would probably be easier to find some way to hack the machines than to build the contraptions.