Paper Tickets and Prize Counters: A Short History
Long before video games, arcades were paying out in paper. Where the prize ticket came from, and why this site is dressed up as one.
Html5Game.sbs is designed to look like a strip of arcade prize tickets: a numbered stub, a perforated edge, your best score printed on the front. It seemed right for a collection of quick games. It also made us curious about where the tickets came from in the first place.
Before the screen
Amusement arcades are much older than video games. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they were full of coin-operated machines: strength testers, fortune tellers, peep shows and games of skill. You paid a penny, and the machine did its trick.
One of the great survivors from that period is Skee-Ball, patented in 1908. You roll a ball up a ramp and try to land it in the highest-scoring ring. It has hardly changed in more than a century, and it is still one of the most reliable ticket payers in any arcade.
The prize problem
Games of skill invite a reward. The trouble is that paying out money looks a lot like gambling, and in many places the law takes a dim view of that. Arcades needed a way to reward a good score that was plainly not cash.
The answer was a token of some kind, exchanged for a prize. A good roll earned a coupon, and enough coupons earned something from behind the counter. This is what the trade calls redemption, and the games are redemption games.
Paper tickets turned out to be ideal. They are cheap to print. They can be numbered. A machine can feed them out one at a time. And a long strip of them, folded over your arm, feels like winning in a way that a number on a screen does not.
The family arcade
The model most people picture took shape in the 1970s. Whac-A-Mole arrived in the middle of that decade and became a fixture. In 1977 Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, opened the first Chuck E. Cheese in California, pairing pizza with a room of games. Restaurants and arcades built around tickets and prize counters spread quickly after that.
By then the pattern was settled. You play, the machine counts, tickets pour out of a slot near your knees, and at the end of the day you stand at a glass counter doing sums.
The famous exchange rate
Anyone who has stood at that counter knows the economics. Hundreds of tickets for a pencil. Thousands for something with batteries. The prize was never really the point.
What the tickets did was make a score physical. A child holding a fistful of paper has something to show for the last ten minutes. It is a receipt for skill, or at least for effort, and it is surprisingly satisfying to hold.
From paper to plastic
Paper tickets are slowly disappearing. Many arcades now load your winnings onto a card, and the count goes up on a screen. It is tidier and cheaper. Nobody has to refill the dispensers or sweep the floor.
Something is lost, though. The clatter of a dispenser paying out a big win was part of the game. Some arcades keep paper for exactly that reason.
What we borrowed
We could not give you paper, and we have no prize counter. What we took from the arcade ticket is the idea behind it.
- A number at the end. Every game here finishes with a score. Not a rank, not a badge. A number.
- Something to keep. Your best score is printed on that game's ticket and stays there until you beat it.
- A scoreboard that is yours. The home page lists your best results. They are saved in your own browser and go nowhere else.
- A quick go. Arcade games were built to be over in a minute so the next person could play. Ours keep the length and drop the queue.
There is one deliberate difference. Arcade redemption games are tuned to pay out a set number of tickets over time, and some rely more on chance than they look. The HTML5 games on this site have nothing to pay out and no reason to cheat. If you score forty in Sky Shield, you earned forty.
A small tribute
If you want the nearest thing here to an old mechanical arcade game, try Fill Line. Hold, watch the level rise, let go at the mark. There are no enemies and no clock, just you trying to stop a moving thing in the right place. People have been paying pennies to do exactly that for well over a hundred years.