Back on topic...
Used to watch (and help) dad on the big break standalone when i was young. Before that and i can't remember a thing. Anyone know what year it was? Must have been early nineties?
Matt
Nostalgic ramblings - the first game you ever played?
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Barry Trotter
- Senior Member
- Posts: 296
- Joined: Sat Apr 30, 2005 2:43 pm
I'm a relative noob to quiz machines.... I got hooked when it became incredibly easy to win £20-30 twice a week on SAD and Hangman. That would have been about November 2001 when I spent a year at York uni. £60 a week was a nice amount to be winning for £5 or so outlay. I used to pick my moments and wait for busy nights. I had a trick of putting £6 or so in to the machine, winning £1 and pressing 'collect' so that £6.50 would drop in to the tray. Add to that the occasional "This machine's easy!" and "This game always pays out too much - it has a bug" and you could pretty much guarantee a stampede of drunken students clambering over each other to throw money in.
It was a beautiful scheme that served me well for many months; all the drunkards remember is how 'easy' it was to win, forgetting the monies they had lost to it.
Those were the days!
It was a beautiful scheme that served me well for many months; all the drunkards remember is how 'easy' it was to win, forgetting the monies they had lost to it.
Those were the days!
Still kicking about.
Cunningly genius Demmerz ... if only I'd thought of that.
Am I right in thinking though that all modern machines insist on all credits being played rather than allowing an excess amount of coins entered to be collected without playing them? This would certainly be in line with 'inconveniencing' the player, though I suppose it makes sense ... a bit. Trivial perhaps, but when I first got caught out by an aspect of this I was a little annoyed: i.e. had a quid in the bank, wanted to play one more game, chose a game after which the the rest of the quid was not collectable, but rather had been transferred from the collectable bank to the uncollectable credit. Don't know if this makes sense, I'm in a rush ... my little lad's birthday party.... bouncy castles, whooooo!!!
Quickly.... Does anyone remember Tic Tac Trivia (Maygay i think)? 20p a shot for £10 JP when in mood. This was my intro, c. 1986, at the local snooker club where I used to 'live'.
Am I right in thinking though that all modern machines insist on all credits being played rather than allowing an excess amount of coins entered to be collected without playing them? This would certainly be in line with 'inconveniencing' the player, though I suppose it makes sense ... a bit. Trivial perhaps, but when I first got caught out by an aspect of this I was a little annoyed: i.e. had a quid in the bank, wanted to play one more game, chose a game after which the the rest of the quid was not collectable, but rather had been transferred from the collectable bank to the uncollectable credit. Don't know if this makes sense, I'm in a rush ... my little lad's birthday party.... bouncy castles, whooooo!!!
Quickly.... Does anyone remember Tic Tac Trivia (Maygay i think)? 20p a shot for £10 JP when in mood. This was my intro, c. 1986, at the local snooker club where I used to 'live'.
As far as I know (and I think the fruit machines all work the same) you have to collect all winnings/credits in £1 coins only, so that was why you couldn't collect the 50p credit you had left after playing the extra game.K_Oranj wrote:had a quid in the bank, wanted to play one more game, chose a game after which the the rest of the quid was not collectable, but rather had been transferred from the collectable bank to the uncollectable credit
If you put notes into an ItBox, you have to play £1's worth of games but can then collect the remainder - useful to know if (a) you need change for something else or (b) the coin receptor is broken, which happens too often really with all machines. I'm not sure how it works if you put say £5 in £1 coins in, but at a guess you'd at least have to win £1 on something before you could then collect the rest.
I was also playing machines as far back as 1986. I have a rubbish memory when it comes to putting a name to a machine, having played so many, but if you could describe Tic Tac Trivia I'm sure it will all come flooding back...
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QuizMaster
- Senior Member
- Posts: 1254
- Joined: Sat Apr 30, 2005 12:40 pm
Quiz Master was certainly a good machine. You could control the win scores yourself. Pitch all 10 scores around 40k and it was out of the range of ordinary punters, and would save all the pay-out money for yourself. This was a feature that wasn't repeated with any subsequent machines.
Give us a Break was probably the most significant machine of the early period. It was the first machine to offer a £10 prize every go so therefore could be emptied of all the tube money. These were followed by the Barcrest range of cash dispensers that could be similarly emptied.
For the benefit of Nil Statis and anyone else interested I include below from memory a list of the quiz machines that I have played in approximate chronological order. I have probably missed some out if anyone can remember any others. I haven't included the the more recent late 90s ones such as Treasure Quest, Risk, Telly Addicts etc as they were pretty piss poor up until Millionaire came on the scene in 2000.
The Primitive Era 1985-86
History begins. The first primitive examples the browsing mammal Quizpromious Erectus walks on the Earth.
Quiz Master/Question Time (Coinmaster)
Mission Impossible (Status),
Tic-Tac-Triv (Barcrest),
Treasure Trail (JPM),
Greyhound (Greyhound),
Blockbuster (Coinmaster)
The Golden Era 1986 - 1997
Quizpromious Heffalumpus now rampant. Found feeding at watering holes up and down the land.
Give us a Break (JPM)
Barquest (Barcrest)
Suit Pursuit (JPM)
Ten Quid Grid (Barcrest)
Breakthru (Coinmaster)
Adders and Ladders (Barcrest)
Inquizitor (Bell-Fruit)
Skill Cash (Barcrest)
Time Machine (Barcrest)
Trail Blazer (Coinmaster)
Give us a Break (second incarnation new cabinet JPM)
Fruit Machine Quiz (Coinmaster)
Skill Trek (Barcrest first £12 machine)
Every Second Counts (Bell Fruit)
The one in the same case as Turnover that I can't remember the name of? (Barcrest)
Beeline (Bell-Fruit)
Eyes Down (Barcrest)
PAC Man (JPM)
Ludo Quiz (Coinmaster)
The card memorisation one? (Maygay)
Treble Top (Bell-Fruit first £20 machine)
£12/£20 Turnover (Barcrest)
Give us a Clue (Maygay)
Genius (Ace)
Crossword Quiz (Maygay)
Quizvaders (Bell-Fruit)
The Eric Bristow darts one (Ace)
Question of Sport (Bell-Fruit)
Monopoly (first 50p play machine and touch screen machine JPM)
Cluedo (JPM)
Monopoly Deluxe (JPM)
Give us a Break was probably the most significant machine of the early period. It was the first machine to offer a £10 prize every go so therefore could be emptied of all the tube money. These were followed by the Barcrest range of cash dispensers that could be similarly emptied.
For the benefit of Nil Statis and anyone else interested I include below from memory a list of the quiz machines that I have played in approximate chronological order. I have probably missed some out if anyone can remember any others. I haven't included the the more recent late 90s ones such as Treasure Quest, Risk, Telly Addicts etc as they were pretty piss poor up until Millionaire came on the scene in 2000.
The Primitive Era 1985-86
History begins. The first primitive examples the browsing mammal Quizpromious Erectus walks on the Earth.
Quiz Master/Question Time (Coinmaster)
Mission Impossible (Status),
Tic-Tac-Triv (Barcrest),
Treasure Trail (JPM),
Greyhound (Greyhound),
Blockbuster (Coinmaster)
The Golden Era 1986 - 1997
Quizpromious Heffalumpus now rampant. Found feeding at watering holes up and down the land.
Give us a Break (JPM)
Barquest (Barcrest)
Suit Pursuit (JPM)
Ten Quid Grid (Barcrest)
Breakthru (Coinmaster)
Adders and Ladders (Barcrest)
Inquizitor (Bell-Fruit)
Skill Cash (Barcrest)
Time Machine (Barcrest)
Trail Blazer (Coinmaster)
Give us a Break (second incarnation new cabinet JPM)
Fruit Machine Quiz (Coinmaster)
Skill Trek (Barcrest first £12 machine)
Every Second Counts (Bell Fruit)
The one in the same case as Turnover that I can't remember the name of? (Barcrest)
Beeline (Bell-Fruit)
Eyes Down (Barcrest)
PAC Man (JPM)
Ludo Quiz (Coinmaster)
The card memorisation one? (Maygay)
Treble Top (Bell-Fruit first £20 machine)
£12/£20 Turnover (Barcrest)
Give us a Clue (Maygay)
Genius (Ace)
Crossword Quiz (Maygay)
Quizvaders (Bell-Fruit)
The Eric Bristow darts one (Ace)
Question of Sport (Bell-Fruit)
Monopoly (first 50p play machine and touch screen machine JPM)
Cluedo (JPM)
Monopoly Deluxe (JPM)
I like the taxonomy regarding the evolution of the quiz machine there Quizard, and a nice list of machines to boot. I don't recognise half of them, though I'm sure I must have played some of these at the time, just can't remember some names.
There's one particular machine that I struggle even to describe, the memory of it being so vague: white letter tiles with points on - and no, it wasn't Scrabble - c.1989 [Just rescanned Quizard's list - probably Crossword Quiz - a one-location, one-other-mate experience with this one]. Another machine I played that might be on that list was out shortly before Monopoly first hit the scene (so c.1991?). I remember playing this particular pre-Monopoly machine down the local boozer, and one of the few memory 'glints' that I'm now left with of playing it with the pub crowd was one guy's remark about the 'cantankerous professor', a small icon-like figure near the top of the screen who spouted out the odd speech bubble, I think. That's about the sum of my memory for that one. No idea what it was called though.
Going back to a machine from the 'erectus' era. My faded memory tells me that this one also had some little figure on it (a wizard?) with perhaps a dunce's cap. Predominant graphics colours were yellow and blue. Answered questions against a clock that had yellow blips around the clock face that ticked down. Perhaps named 'Cash Quiz', hmmm? (My memory's urging the name 'Cash Quiz' on this one, though could this possibly be the 'Skill Cash' that Quizard lists? I need a game description on that one.) In a local pub for a while and a brief memory of it in an arcade when on holiday ... somewhere ... perhaps ... it all seems like a dream now ... ohhhh, the magical joys of nostalgia. I do remember that around this time I was inspired to write a quiz program in BASIC on the glorious ZX Spectrum 128K, and stuck some questions from this particular machine into my fledgling program. I'm sure that I've still got the tapes with revisions of this program boxed somewhere, and I know I've still got my old Speccy in its box ... maybe on a rainy Sunday afternoon .... It might be an interesting experiment to see if its easier to get this old program loaded in from tape to appear on the TV screen than, say, to install Linux, or perform some other modern-day 'basic' computer setup.
As QuizMaster says (and corrects me with JPM as the manu, though just noticed Quizard has it down as Barcrest!? - those were the days before I started paying much attention to who made them), Tic-Tac-Trivia came before 'Give Us a Break'. This is certainly the chronology that I experienced from my snooker hall/quiz machine days. After a year or so of sixth-form Tic-Tac-Trivving, DLT's uncovered JP snooker quizzer hit the scene. Maybe unwisely, I never took to it as much as Tic Tac Trivia. Not sure why. Anyway to a brief description of Tic Tac Trivia if anyone's interested.
As the name suggests the game play was based around the stone-age game of Tic Tac Toe, or Noughts and Crosses to us Brits (though 'Noughts and Crosses Trivia' doesn't quite have the same ring to it). The game was split into two stages. My sketchy recollection:
Stage 1: You chose a main category (Films, Sport, etc.). The 3-by-3 grid would then appear with a sub-category in each of the nine squares. So, for example, if you chose Films, one of the squares might be Cops 'n' Robbers for questions on films of that type. Another might be Comedy Films or something like that. I think that the player (as opposed to the machine) was the first to choose one of the sub-category squares. A correct answer saw an 'X' being placed in that square. Then the machine would choose a square. Again, if you got it right then your marker (I think it was an 'X') would be placed in the square. For a wrong answer though, an 'O' would be entered there. And so you'd take turns with the machine at choosing the squares. Once a line of 3 'X's was achieved, then on to Stage 2. Game over though if the machine managed a line of 3 'O's, or if all the nine squares were filled without a line of your X's being achieved, and time to stick in another 20p.
Stage 2: Bonus Round I think it was called.
Questions from any category appeared from hereon in. I'm not sure if you answered questions until you got one wrong, or if there was a maximum number of questions, maybe 10, from this point on. The latter I think. What I do remember is that time became a factor here. Starting with the points acquired from the first round, if you answered the Bonus round questions straight away, you would double your points. The more time you took the less points you'd get added to your total. There may have been different settings, but on all the machines I played the top prize points rung was always set at 800,000 points. When the machine was in payout mood this top rung was at £10, once ripped it fell to a £1. Couple of days (if that) after JP'ing, it was at a £10 prize level again, or near enough. Average 17 questions for a decent prize, and if memory serves me right, say you were half way up the points rung at £5 and got a question wrong you DIDN'T lose what you'd so far won at that points level, erm, like on the machines of today.... Grrrrrrrrrr.
A nice little touch on this machine, one which I've never seen on any other, was little info snippets that some questions gave you if you got the answer right (and maybe even if you got the question wrong). These appeared in a space along the bottom of the screen, and gave you a little extra fact about the subject of the question that had just been asked. Anyway, loved it......... A year and a half after playing this machine, I'd amassed a few thousand questions from it, and as many from Trailblazer (c.198
. Regrettably, I later binned 'em in a failed attempt to curb my obsessive question collecting tendencies. However, obsessiveness just manifested itself in other areas... now I collect Star Wars figures.... just kidding, kind of gone back to the info 
.
Regarding my earlier comment about machines' insistence on playing 50p left in the bank. £1 Hoppers.... of course, must have had a brain jam. Perhaps I should have asked what would happen if you stuck two £1 coins (or one £2 coin, same difference?) in an ITBox and played two games. Would it then be possible to collect the other £1 as if it was in the Bank, or would it be flagged as Credit that could not be collected? Easy enough to find out I suppose, I just get the feeling that it would register both £1s as uncollectable credit which would preclude the possibility of performing Demmerz's trick of yore.
- "The card memorisation one? (Maygay)" = POKER QUIZ
Came out just before Millionaire I think, 1999/2000. If not the last 'real buttons' machine, then one of the last. How I miss those real buttons, when I think about it.
Finally, Quizard mentions 'Treasure Quest'. I've had a spare one of these knocking about for a while and recently had to dismantle it to make some space in my humble abode. I've toyed with the idea of putting it up on eBay, though probably wouldn't get too much for it. Alternatively, I'm thinking that if anyone wants it as a fancy flashing bit of furniture I might be willing to oblige. If anyone does seriously want it though, it would mean picking it up in an estate car/van from the North West. Also, if you fancied, I could assemble its parts back together wherever you'd be taking it to, though you'd probably have to put me up for the night after showing me around your local drinking holes. Just an idea. PM me if you're interested.
I've been meaning to post some stuff here for a while now, glad I finally got round to it. Enjoy tonight's game, whereupon we shall see if England can finally get it together!!! At a wild guess 3-1......
There's one particular machine that I struggle even to describe, the memory of it being so vague: white letter tiles with points on - and no, it wasn't Scrabble - c.1989 [Just rescanned Quizard's list - probably Crossword Quiz - a one-location, one-other-mate experience with this one]. Another machine I played that might be on that list was out shortly before Monopoly first hit the scene (so c.1991?). I remember playing this particular pre-Monopoly machine down the local boozer, and one of the few memory 'glints' that I'm now left with of playing it with the pub crowd was one guy's remark about the 'cantankerous professor', a small icon-like figure near the top of the screen who spouted out the odd speech bubble, I think. That's about the sum of my memory for that one. No idea what it was called though.
Going back to a machine from the 'erectus' era. My faded memory tells me that this one also had some little figure on it (a wizard?) with perhaps a dunce's cap. Predominant graphics colours were yellow and blue. Answered questions against a clock that had yellow blips around the clock face that ticked down. Perhaps named 'Cash Quiz', hmmm? (My memory's urging the name 'Cash Quiz' on this one, though could this possibly be the 'Skill Cash' that Quizard lists? I need a game description on that one.) In a local pub for a while and a brief memory of it in an arcade when on holiday ... somewhere ... perhaps ... it all seems like a dream now ... ohhhh, the magical joys of nostalgia. I do remember that around this time I was inspired to write a quiz program in BASIC on the glorious ZX Spectrum 128K, and stuck some questions from this particular machine into my fledgling program. I'm sure that I've still got the tapes with revisions of this program boxed somewhere, and I know I've still got my old Speccy in its box ... maybe on a rainy Sunday afternoon .... It might be an interesting experiment to see if its easier to get this old program loaded in from tape to appear on the TV screen than, say, to install Linux, or perform some other modern-day 'basic' computer setup.
As QuizMaster says (and corrects me with JPM as the manu, though just noticed Quizard has it down as Barcrest!? - those were the days before I started paying much attention to who made them), Tic-Tac-Trivia came before 'Give Us a Break'. This is certainly the chronology that I experienced from my snooker hall/quiz machine days. After a year or so of sixth-form Tic-Tac-Trivving, DLT's uncovered JP snooker quizzer hit the scene. Maybe unwisely, I never took to it as much as Tic Tac Trivia. Not sure why. Anyway to a brief description of Tic Tac Trivia if anyone's interested.
As the name suggests the game play was based around the stone-age game of Tic Tac Toe, or Noughts and Crosses to us Brits (though 'Noughts and Crosses Trivia' doesn't quite have the same ring to it). The game was split into two stages. My sketchy recollection:
Stage 1: You chose a main category (Films, Sport, etc.). The 3-by-3 grid would then appear with a sub-category in each of the nine squares. So, for example, if you chose Films, one of the squares might be Cops 'n' Robbers for questions on films of that type. Another might be Comedy Films or something like that. I think that the player (as opposed to the machine) was the first to choose one of the sub-category squares. A correct answer saw an 'X' being placed in that square. Then the machine would choose a square. Again, if you got it right then your marker (I think it was an 'X') would be placed in the square. For a wrong answer though, an 'O' would be entered there. And so you'd take turns with the machine at choosing the squares. Once a line of 3 'X's was achieved, then on to Stage 2. Game over though if the machine managed a line of 3 'O's, or if all the nine squares were filled without a line of your X's being achieved, and time to stick in another 20p.
Stage 2: Bonus Round I think it was called.
Questions from any category appeared from hereon in. I'm not sure if you answered questions until you got one wrong, or if there was a maximum number of questions, maybe 10, from this point on. The latter I think. What I do remember is that time became a factor here. Starting with the points acquired from the first round, if you answered the Bonus round questions straight away, you would double your points. The more time you took the less points you'd get added to your total. There may have been different settings, but on all the machines I played the top prize points rung was always set at 800,000 points. When the machine was in payout mood this top rung was at £10, once ripped it fell to a £1. Couple of days (if that) after JP'ing, it was at a £10 prize level again, or near enough. Average 17 questions for a decent prize, and if memory serves me right, say you were half way up the points rung at £5 and got a question wrong you DIDN'T lose what you'd so far won at that points level, erm, like on the machines of today.... Grrrrrrrrrr.
A nice little touch on this machine, one which I've never seen on any other, was little info snippets that some questions gave you if you got the answer right (and maybe even if you got the question wrong). These appeared in a space along the bottom of the screen, and gave you a little extra fact about the subject of the question that had just been asked. Anyway, loved it......... A year and a half after playing this machine, I'd amassed a few thousand questions from it, and as many from Trailblazer (c.198
. Regrettably, I later binned 'em in a failed attempt to curb my obsessive question collecting tendencies. However, obsessiveness just manifested itself in other areas... now I collect Star Wars figures.... just kidding, kind of gone back to the info .Regarding my earlier comment about machines' insistence on playing 50p left in the bank. £1 Hoppers.... of course, must have had a brain jam. Perhaps I should have asked what would happen if you stuck two £1 coins (or one £2 coin, same difference?) in an ITBox and played two games. Would it then be possible to collect the other £1 as if it was in the Bank, or would it be flagged as Credit that could not be collected? Easy enough to find out I suppose, I just get the feeling that it would register both £1s as uncollectable credit which would preclude the possibility of performing Demmerz's trick of yore.
- "The card memorisation one? (Maygay)" = POKER QUIZ
Came out just before Millionaire I think, 1999/2000. If not the last 'real buttons' machine, then one of the last. How I miss those real buttons, when I think about it.
Finally, Quizard mentions 'Treasure Quest'. I've had a spare one of these knocking about for a while and recently had to dismantle it to make some space in my humble abode. I've toyed with the idea of putting it up on eBay, though probably wouldn't get too much for it. Alternatively, I'm thinking that if anyone wants it as a fancy flashing bit of furniture I might be willing to oblige. If anyone does seriously want it though, it would mean picking it up in an estate car/van from the North West. Also, if you fancied, I could assemble its parts back together wherever you'd be taking it to, though you'd probably have to put me up for the night after showing me around your local drinking holes. Just an idea. PM me if you're interested.
I've been meaning to post some stuff here for a while now, glad I finally got round to it. Enjoy tonight's game, whereupon we shall see if England can finally get it together!!! At a wild guess 3-1......
Welcome to Fruitchat - always good to see another old timer (and one with a better memory than mine for the games of my misspent youth!). Tic Tac Triv really doesn't ring any bells so Give Us A Break must indeed be the first major machine that I can remember.K_Oranj wrote:I've been meaning to post some stuff here for a while now, glad I finally got round to it.
P.S. I'm not a fan myself, but do I detect a Fall reference in your username?
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Istenem
- Senior Member
- Posts: 5918
- Joined: Sat Apr 30, 2005 2:42 pm
- Location: the nation's capital
- Contact:
it is never enough.
i missed all but the arse end of the push-button era as i am a spring chicken, but early itboxes could be profitable (perhaps not in the same league as having several piggy banks on your rounds though.) i do remember poker quiz and the cluedo/hangman/scrabble era but i was only 16ish so neither confident in pubs or knowledgable enough.
i missed all but the arse end of the push-button era as i am a spring chicken, but early itboxes could be profitable (perhaps not in the same league as having several piggy banks on your rounds though.) i do remember poker quiz and the cluedo/hangman/scrabble era but i was only 16ish so neither confident in pubs or knowledgable enough.
nobody ever wins on those things.
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Cardinal Sin
- Senior Member
- Posts: 4166
- Joined: Wed Jul 20, 2005 3:33 pm
Sorry, UP, I've been doing some rudimentary arithmetic. Your claims to be a "spring chicken" and only being 16 at the time of Hangman et al.. don't really tie in with the fact that I played Hangman et al when I was at uni in 1996 (when I was 18 ), yet I remember watching Going for Gold when I was off sick from primary school.
