Play Meter

(continued from page 19 )
PLAY METER: So you rework the mech so that it
rejects those "counterfeit coins.
ISAACSON: As much as we can.
PLAY METER: The manufacturers who make slug
rejectors, can't they do that for you.
ISAACSON: They will eventually. If you could
boycott them, it would help. But everybody buys
them so why should they worry about it? Let the
guy on the street sweat it out.
The majority of calls on all coin operated games
are from coin chutes: bad coins, ice cream sticks, all
sorts of things. If a guy could come up with a coin
mech that would just reject anything and
everything except an honest-to-goodness coin he
would make a million. The problem is a bad coin
makes the chute inoperative, just like that. That's
why it's good to have to coin chutes. You should
have four or five .
Also, some of the manufacturers put the slug
rejector in such a position you can hardly get to it.
You have to crawl in on your back to reach it, or
stand on you head to make an adjustment on it. And
that's the heart of the machine, the slug rejector.
PLAY METER: Is that your biggest complaint, the
slug rejectors and the placement of them, their
inaccesibility for repairs?
ISAACSON: I'd say so.
PLAY METER: What other things do you have to
do when you get a game, let's say a flipper first, out
of the crate, before you put it on location?
ISAACSON: You have to see that all the parts are
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straightened out, that none fell apart coming from
the factory. That's another labor problem really.
Instead of having the parts secured like they should
have been when the game was manufactured, they
might have just stuck a piece in and forgotten to
tighten up the screws.
Then a lot of our time is consumed in putting
meters on, because we do put a lot of meters on.
You get all kinds of information from a meter. We
may have been the first operation to do
percentaging; we percentage guns, flippers; we
percentage everything we can.
PLAY METER: What's your ideal percentage on a
flipper game?
ISAACSON: There isn't any ideal. You go by
location, the kind of players you get on a location.
The ideal percentaging is one that makes the public
happy and yet insures making a profit. In a location
where we have a lot of good players, I'd say we're
averaging in the forties on replays. At the airport,
where we've got mostly novices, it runs about 25
per cent. But if you took those same machines at the
airport and put them on an "expert" location, they'd
be liable to go 60 per cent.
PLAY METER: What about a standard video
game, how do you go about percentaging that?
ISAACSON: We can't put a meter on it and that's
unfortunate. We wish we could.
PLAY METER: You can't meter free plays? Why's
that?
ISAACSON: It's not built into the game. We do try
to give the player enough time to make the score.
We've always believed in operating liberally,
whether flipper or bingo or video. It's the liberal
games that seem to last the longest.
PLAY METER: Once a game is on location, what
happens to it in terms of your maintenance
program? What can you do to a game to prevent it
from breaking dow, to prevent down time before it
starts?
ISAACSON: We constantly check good locations.
We have our mechanics go to the location, not wait
for calls. But it doesn't always help. Something
might break down as soon as you walk out the door.
I checked one location myself last week, and by the
time I'd checked the last machine, the first was
already out of order.
PLAY METER: When you get a game in, can you
pretty much guess what's going to go wrong and
prevent that before it happens?
ISAACSON: That's not really possible. Other than
the coin chute problems, the next most common
problem that occurs in a flipper game is probably
broken wires. But you can't predict that; you can't
predict where that's going to happen.
PLA Y METER: What sort of life do you people
experience on location with flipper games?
ISAACSON: A Gone with the Wind or a Godfather
will run a year where a regular movie will run a
week or two weeks. It's the same thing. The funny
part about games though is that no matter how
lousy one is, there's going to be one location where
it's the greatest game that was ever built, even if
it's a game you couldn't make a dime out of
anywhere else.