I tried to profit at an arcade 

What a dumb idea

My friends and I cheesed the "Deal or No Deal" machine at an arcade once. At the beginning of the game, the screen shows you the values of all the cases, and then plays a scrambling animation. Turns out this animation is actually how they mix up the cases (it's not just randomized with number generation afterwards for some reason), so we pulled out our phones and recorded the scramble in slow-motion. Then one person would play the game, stalling as long as they could, while the recorder would scrub through the video, following the biggest case. We could win the maximum amount of tickets every time with this method.

Imagine being the arcade worker and having to watch the road work guy come in for three days straight, go apeshit on one single machine, buy the most obscure prizes, and never return again

I worked as an "Arcade Manager" in college. Yes, you can profit! The secret is _owning_ the machines. You're welcome 😊 🙏🏻

me and this girl went to an arcade for our first date and we bonded over your video and spent about an hour playing that stupid ball game. that girl is now my girlfriend. thank you, danny.

That arcade worker must think Drew is the biggest incel on the planet coming in two days in the middle of the work day, absolutely killing it in a meaningless game, and then cashing out a hot dog toaster, man cave sign, and avengers mug.

I cannot imagine the employees reaction to seeing this grown man come to the arcade three days in a row, to play the same game, to buy the weirdest prizes. I hope Drew is a story spread amongst the employees for years to come

Two things from an arcade employee- 1. The reason the game counts the tickets so slowly is because the card reader has to communicate with the headquarters of the card company and then send the tickets back to the arcade. Where I work, it has to communicate from South Carolina to Missouri back to South Carolina. 2. Maximum payout is actually a very poorly worded anti-glitch mechanism. The machine stops giving out tickets at a certain point so it doesn't give out unlimited tickets. You just have to let an employee know, they swipe their card, and it overrides the maximum payout notification and gives you the rest of the tickets.

As a dad, I do love the card system for efficiency purposes. But as an arcade lover it makes me said that my kids won't experience the rush of tickets spewing out of a machine.

In today's episode: Drew narrowly avoids a gambling addiction

My local arcade used to have an electric chair (game?) that gave you tickets for as long as you could hold on while it shocked you. I used to spend all of my tokens there because it was a sure fire way to get tickets, but in retrospect it meant that I often spent my entire arcade experience getting moderately tortured just so I could win "prizes" I could get from a dollar store, all for the low price of like 50 bucks.

I wonder if that free 30 minute play card could have been used to raise the jackpot by losing on purpose every time

7:02 "theres just something about cubed meat that makes me feel like im being given my rations for the day" made me think about the video where him and amanda eat the squares

the fact that Drew and Amanda put their bowling names names as "Me" and "BimBim" (their cat) is hilarious to me

For anyone wondering about the slow ticket payout. A majority of modern arcade machines are still built with paper tickets in mind. The swipers we use are a modification, not the intention behind most machines. Due to this, the machine lets off 'pulses' to output the paper tickets. When we splice into that line with a swiper harness, we are limited by the game's pulses. As an example, look at the Ticket Time machine showed a few times. Those ticket rings use an RFID system to payout to the swiper. That game was made for swipers, so it can payout 25 tickets per pulse, rather than 1. Meaning it's payouts only take mere seconds, even for large payouts. Hopefully, over time, the arcade business will evolve to favor this faster payout system, rather than the archaic paper-based payouts. Source: I'm the guy who repairs those machines.

The decimal is there to make sure you never exactly use up all the points you bought. A very effective psychological tactic to entice you to re-up.

I work at a Main Event and let’s just say, there is no profiting. There’s one dude who comes in around once a month and just plays a single game (milk jug toss, and he’s really good at it) as many times as he can and has accumulated 2 million points (what you use to redeem prizes) and even he tells me there is no profiting, he does it as a way to give back to the community by giving away all of the prizes he wins to little kids. Main Event is a children’s casino but the only thing you get as a reward of spending your hard earned money on is a Frozen Elsa sing along microphone that will probably break in 2-3 business days

This is exactly the type of thing everyone wished they could do but we don't so we watch Drew live our dreams instead

I read the title as “I tried eliminating an elected official”, I was SO confused after 20 minutes

I profited at an arcade once, a kid in front of me won a _ton_ of tickets but the machine ran out after a few. He thought it was broken and left, but I asked an employee to refill it and I got all of his tickets. So I guess the best strategy is... stealing? Or at least scavenging Also I found a machine that had a minimum payout above zero, so even if I "lost" I'd get _something._

I find it hilarious that the most replayed moment of this entire video is when Amanda looks into the camera and says "I love you now". So many dreams fulfilled. LOL

looks like Drew finally realised he can write off expenses on his taxes…

i love how drews strayed from the format of "talk about bad content" and now he just fucks around

The best thing I ever won from a Main Event was a neon green lava lamp. It's basically your everyday run of the mill one that you can buy at Spencer's for $20 but I cherish it so much and it is going into my will to become a family heirloom

I did this once, even when I was a kid. There was a coop space shooter game at the Chuck E. Cheese where multiple people worked together. Well, it turns out, if you had literally any number of players more than 1, it was trivially easy to play forever on a single play, even for 2 children. I only had my brother, but it was never hard to rope some other kids into it and teach them how to survive forever with only 1 or 2 wasted plays if they agreed to give us 200 tickets. There was no competitive element at all, so no kid had any incentive to break it except boredom, and they could just intentionally die without screwing anyone else over. Me and my brother got a GameCube this way. Unfortunately, they removed the game after only a few months, presumably because we had stupidly told the counter guy how we got all those tickets.

“I love you now” Never forget that this is Amanda’s world and we’re all just living in it

Tip from an arcade attendant: If you reach the maximum payout, get an employee to swipe their employee card on the machine, and the unawarded tickets will be put onto your card.

Even if Drew sold 7,000,000,000 (seven billion) Marvel mugs for 10$ USD each he *STILL* wouldn’t be in the top 10 of richest people in the world.

drew talking about his "profits" at the end is the epitome of girl math and i'm so proud of him for that

When I was a kid I won the jackpot on this one game at an arcade and I won like 5,000 tickets or something. I used them to buy this inflatable fighter jet that was like 2 feet long and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. When I got home, I went to inflate it using my dad's industrial air compressor but it was so powerful that the inflatable jet immediately just exploded.

If Drew never makes another video again, we know why 💰💰💰

I once met a guy at a Dave N’ Busters who had been living off of profits in an arcade. What he would do was pay 100 each day and get about 3-5 consoles from the arcade each day and would sell them off, and made an infinite money glitch to some extent. He also taught me and my buddies his tricks for all the different games and the best ones for profit. He was an absolute gem.

I don’t think it’s possible to watch one Drew Gooden video without going on a six-day full-channel binge afterwards

i have that same hotdog machine.. it caught fire when i tried making hotdogs with it, near burned my house down. So they were exremely hot dogs.

Imagine the main event employees watching him come in three days in a row and standing at the same machine for hours

my friend and I found an employees' unlimited free play card at a hotel arcade once so we just played the ticket roll crane game until we had tens of thousands of tickets and we didn't know what to spend it on so we just gave them out to kids at the redemption kiosk😭😭 we got this little girl the barbie vanity set she wanted bc we heard her dad saying she didn't have enough tickets and she was so happy💔

I went to las vegas this summer for like 4 days. My brother had a basketball tournament there and we all just went with him as a family vacation. My sister and I didn't want to watch, so we went to an arcade. I watched this video like 2 days before we left. My eyes practically lit up when I saw that damn machine standing there. Thanks to this video, my sister and I (and even my brother on the 4th day when he finished the tournament and joined us) got so many damn jackpots. When I saw quick drop was there, I went with my sister to check out the prize section and we dreamt big on what we were going to get. I now have a new mic, a new good and clacky rgb keyboard (that came with a shitty rgb mouse), 2 new gaming headsets, a knockoff NES with 620 old games, 2 of these weird 3d star that expands to sphere toy things (idk how to describe it), a 10 ft long USBC cable, a 10 ft long lightning cable (ios charging cable), knockoff air pods, and 2 different colours of wired earbuds. We wouldn't have played the long game without this video. Thank you so much road work guy.

as a former floridian, the fact that drew went anywhere near international drive in the middle of the day, on a weekday, smack in the middle of "end of year field trip" season, is truly admirable. risking it all for the grind. that's what makes him the youtuber

'You can't put a price on dopamine. So technically, you always profit.' - The gambler's coping mechanism.

drews face walking out with the toaster is so wholesome.

5:29 "Gimme that Jackpot baby! That'll be 711 points please!" "I love you now." lmao love you two!

The intro was actually very helpful for me. When I read the title I thought Drew had bought an entire arcade to renovate to see if he could sell it at a higher value.

I love how he trows the minion away and it is immediately banished to the shadow realm “4:32“

I had to replay at 4:39 like 50 times because I’m a simple man and the minion being banished into eternal non existence had me in hysterics

there's something so unrewarding about not getting physical tickets i haven't been to an arcade in so long so i never realized they switched to cards lol

The most upsetting arcade prize I have ever received was a huge lollipop. Like literally softball sized. Turns out it was actually a plastic container holding a bunch of normal sized lollipops, wrapped in a giant dumdums wrapper Most scammed I've ever been

Drew you're supposed to open the hotdog bun before toasting it

7:04 Now look at you Drew. Making an entire video about eating cubed meat!!

imagining Drew in a bad fake moustache comically sneaking into the arcade to play the ball game and having a group of security guards carrying him out kicking and screaming

Drew seems like the type of kid who would stick his hand up claw machines to try and get a toy and cry when he got stuck

Simply win all the mugs and when they run out of mugs sell them BACK to the arcade. I should be asleep.

"while you were having fun, I was studying the cup. when you were shooting aliens and raciimg motorcycles, I was watching the airflow of the plastic balls as they glided gracefully from the tube to the cup. you went to the arcade to have a good time I went to the arcade for enlightenment. we are not the same.

The gaming version of trying to beat the buffet

MAXIMUM PAYOUT DOESNT MEAN YOU DONT EARN THE TICKETS!!! you have to go to an employee and have them swipe it, and it will award the rest. the reason there's a maximum payout is to prevent system errors from paying out more tickets than the person earned.

15:45 3/10 dad, bad cable management

I love how he said “I don’t know if this is the best day of my life” when he is literally married and had a wedding

I met a guy in a Dave and Busters who makes money this way. He was insanely good at almost every game and knew exactly how to beat them optimally. He earns enough tickets off of a $100 card to buy a Wii U to then resell. This was several years ago, so I don't know if he still wins Wii U's or if he buys something different now. He use to be in a few arcade youtube channels videos. I think his name had something to do with mewtwo. If i find it ill reply to this comment.

drew gooden literally just went to fuck off at an arcade and play games, and he effectively billed us. What a hero.

i watched the part where his girl friend said “i love you now” cause i’m sad and it made me feel a smidge of happiness and that someone loved me

Being somewhat of a gamer myself, I saw all the twists coming and ....it just made them all that much better. Shared pain comrade

I used to work at a lesser known arcade, and there was a time when one of our sister locations went out of business and all their inventory went to us. So many plushies everywhere, the back areas were so full. So the technicians, in an effort to get rid of the inventory faster, made the claw machine games easy to win. One night, there were two vloggers that came in and played the claw games and left with two big garbage bags full of toys and freakin the fuck out. And I am so happy for them for that lucky stroke

Wow I didn’t realize how much arcades suck without tokens and tickets Nobody wants a credit card for an arcade. If you can’t carry a massive pile of tickets to the cash out machine, what’s even the point?

Couldn’t you have told the workers that you had unawarded tickets so they could let you use your winnings? I’ve had to do that with my parents before when I won a ridiculous 2000 jackpot and the machine ran out of tickets halfway through

15:00 huh. I wonder if the arcade workers actually set that jackpot higher manually at the start of each day, to give the illusion of increased difficulty. So that when you win it feels like so much more of an accomplishment. Either that, or it inflates the perceived consistent value of the jackpot for the first few players.

I am convinced that drew is the most unpredictable youtuber

Amanda is so funny. And it’s so nice of her to feature a new budding comedian like drew Gooden on her channel.

Drew Gooden is like if John Mulaney was a RU-vidr and also more self-conscious

i went to an arcade once where there was an extremely broken game that was like plants vs zombies and you were a pea shooter, and with enough skill you could win most times, and the jackpot was massive. i milked the shit out of that game and got 2 massive inflatable balls that i would bounce around on. definitely worth it.

I live in Orlando and just got back from this exact arcade and there was a giant crowd of people around the machine all using the technique from this video of mashing the button 4 times following a slight pause. It was beautiful to watch

I'm not particularly a fan of arcades, but the last time I went to one with my grandpa I really wanted a Pikachu plushie and after a few tries I really couldn't get it and I obviously looked really sad about it because some worker just silently came and opened the machine, grabbed the pikachu and handed it to me, went "shh" and then walked away :') bless that guy

I’ve seen this machine in multiple places now, but with varying amounts of (minimum) jackpot, so I guess it depends on your target whether the target arcade will ever notice that players are gaining points too easily

Aircades are amazing places, even in my 20's. However, theyre impeccably overpriced. I remember growing up going to disney quest for $40 and every single game inside was free. They had hundreds of games, experiences and things to do. Arcades need to take the theme park pricing model, entrace fees and then upsell once theyre inside. Paying per machine is like paying per ride at a theme park, seems silly and adds up awefully quick especially with families

In middle school I went to a bday party at the arcade. I accidentally dominated at skeeball and won a jackpot, but the mom made me share my tickets with everyone at the party so all I got was a pack of gum or something. I never forgave that woman

I once abused this cabinet called “Timberman”, an arcade recreation of a mobile game similarly to Flappy Bird or Crossy Road. Because I had actually been so good at the game and played the mobile version religiously for weeks, I was able win the jackpot 3/4 tries. I was so good I had people lining up for me to win the game for them. It cashed out 1000 tickets for EACH JACKPOT and it did not reset with each win. I won a pair of Switch Joycons ($100 CAD) and an Apple TV4K ($250 CAD) with only $50 worth of credits in the 2 times I went in over a year or so. I recently went back on a date and I knew exactly where I wanted to go. So I grabbed my credits and headed for Timberman... only to realize the game took twice as long, was twice as hard to beat and only gave out 250 tickets now instead of 1000 for a jackpot. I recently moved cities and found the same modern arcade brand in the new city where I lived and became curious to see if they had the arcade cabinet too. To my surprise, they did, and it was also twice as difficult and gave 750 less than it did before. I take 100% responsibility for being the reason an arcade cabinet was nerfed nationally, and maybe be the reason why profiting off an arcade had been made slightly more difficult.

If you bought 3 mancave signs, technically you would've profitted way more. I don't know how much more because I can't do math, but certainly more. Because I think everyone would buy a sign that says "Mancave". I would buy it for pure satirical value! Good job, Danny 👍

“What? You ran out of virtual tickets?? Just make more of them!” The Fed has entered the chat

What made me the most angry/disappointed was that Drew toasted the hotdog buns wrong. If he had just looked at the box a little closer he would've seen that he was supposed to open the buns so it toasted the inside, not burned the outside. Please try again and do it correctly so we can get an accurate, unbiased review.

My fiance and me got Guitar Hero from the arcade like 15 years ago. It was 38,000 tickets. I am embarrassed to tell you how much we probably spent on it but I was trying to stop doing drugs so hanging out at a kids arcade seemed like a good idea.

“There’s just something my about cubed meat that makes me feel like I’m being given my rations for the day” While you’re at it, why not try cubed broccoli that tastes like spinach

You could buy multiple cards to continue playing past the payout limit. Most arcades allow pooling cards to buy a bigger prize

The fact that Drew had to ask the SAME EMPLOYEE to redeem his prizes is just RICH. HOWLING over the implications

The fact that he’s going to be able to write the expense off on his taxes is too much

That ticket limit hurt my soul. I remember as a kid pissing off employees cuase I’ll say the game is out of tickets and they see it says 3000+ jackpot. The joy I had from the “tf kid” look while the machine screams “JACKPOT! JACKPOT! JACKPOT!”

I worked at an arcade for 3 years, some thoughts for anyone interested. 1. I asked the owner of my arcade one time if he thought a motivated player could profit off the ticket shop. "Even if he could, we'd sell enough airheads and tootsie rolls to cover it". 2. Also our arcade DID NOT have a max ticket payout if you kept winning. I'm actually shocked to see that, I've played around in the Intercard settings and never seen that feature. 3. Drew's performance on Quik Drop is pretty impressive, we had that game too. My coworker Tyler was into it and played it a lot when we were empty. I remember coming to the same conclusion as drew in the video: you have to have the rhythm of 4 and sneak a few extras in where you can. When you get 5 in the first and last usually have to bounce in off the rim. Anyway I don't think even Tyler was winning 2 out of 5 jackpots, props. 4. at my arcade, I figured the most reliable money maker to be the Double Spin on Wheel of Fortune. A smart person can win every round, you get 2x3xspin value plus 200 per correct answer. For $2 you'd average around 135 tickets/dollar. If you played enough though you'd land the jackpot slices on the wheel and get a few extra hundred tickets here and there. At 130tix/$ you could get a 1000 ticket item for around $7.50. Some of our 1000 ticket items probably couldn't be SOLD for $7.50 on eBay, but at that price it might have at least been cheaper than what you could get it for in a store

I’ve always thought about that with arcades, I imagine the large prizes are so rarely won that workers probably get confused and agitated when someone actually claims them.

I’m a technician manager in an arcade. The reason the tickets get added one-by-one is because the card swiper uses the wires for the paper ticket dispenser and has to electronically emulate the tickets coming out one-by-one.

i went to a summer camp thing when i was twelve and on a rainy day we took a trip to a place like this. there was one kid who was really good at the ball drop game. he won the jackpot for everyone in the group and it was practically robbery when everyone cashed in their tickets

i was working at an arcade when you uploaded this and i now have the experience to say this: we don't profit either. i promise. idk where the money goes. i got paid 11 an hour but for the record: our arcade DOES have a 1 cent:1 ticket ratio. however the credits and points are seperate (to prevent people from just buying tickets and immediately buying prizes with those)

Drew went through all this and all I had to do was cry so hard at the Cyclone not giving me tickets that an employee came over, fixed the ticket dispenser, and let me keep literally all the tickets in the machine

i cant imagine running into drew gooden in an arcade and him being so focused on the ball game

Walking out with the hotdog toaster with the smile of accomplishment was so funny

I used to work at main event as a technician, so I can shine a little bit of light on why this all works the way it does. 1) the tickets count up slowly because these are retrofit machines. The card reader can be installed, or a ticket feeder can be installed. When a ticket feeder is in use the machine sends a pulse to the feeder, and then it dispenses 1 ticket. If the machine sends 50 pulses, the feeder dispenses 50 tickets. The reason the card reader can't just "count it all at once," is because it doesn't know hoe much you've won, it simply pays out the number of pulses that it gets sent. Those pulses come in the amount of time it takes to dispense one ticket, so it takes a little while. 2) When the card reader says, "Maximum Payout," That doesn't mean you haven't been awarded those tickets, it means a member of staff needs to authorize the payout by swiping their employee card. This is to prevent cheating. The card reader will flag a maximum payout when the machine pays more tickets than it typically does to a single user. The card reader will be unusable until an employee either authorizes the payout or denies it, so chances are after you left, someone who wanted to play the game couldn't and an employee swiped the reader to authorize your payout. There were other things that I wanted to talk about but I've forgotten them, and rewatching the video to find them would be 22 minutes of my life, again. Sue me.

Once I went in with 5 dollars.. played enough to score a ruler as the prize.. used it to sweep out under the machines and collect lost tokens. Balled out that day lolll

Its a shame they had to raise the price of Turbo Dave after kids started salvaging his Hover Board for precious metals

the script of this video is really good in my opinion, I tend to re-watch Drew's videos all the time but this one always gets me lol

16:41 drew: goes to community college for 8 months danny: casually graduates from college with a degree in computational media

There’s something about cubed meat that makes me feel like I’m being fed my rations for the day. Absolutely killed me lmao, those nachos looked pretty mediocre tho.

Imagine working at main event then constantly seeing a panicked Drew Gooden come in there 2 times a week for a month trying to get as many tickets as possible in ball drop

Once me and my friends were on a machine at the arcade and the ticket payouts stopped working, and a guy came over to fix it, and he clearly didn't give a shit because he gave us all the tickets in the machine and just put a new roll in. We spent almost half an hour feeding the tickets into a ticket counter and went to the desk and we still didn't have enough to get any of the good prizes.

this was the first video i saw of yours and i've been on a two month binge. so glad i found your channel. had to come back here where it all started