How many times have we walked past an arcade and felt the temptation to test our skill by pounding on dolls or pressing a button at exactly the right moment to win thousands of tickets and claim the best prizes? Unfortunately, that’s nothing but an illusion. Inventor and YouTuber Mark Rober is back with a small machine based on Arduino hardware, specially designed to always win at the Cyclone game… but its programming has other plans.
YouTube is full of tricks and suggestions for storming the most popular arcade machines and taking home all their prizes, but at the end of the day they always fall into the same thing: The machines are rigged, and they will only respond to our skill once they have received a certain amount of money. Obviously this is logical because the machines’ goal is not to lose money, but the process of detecting that “payment moment” is no less tedious and frustrating. The underlying problem is that some arcade machines claim to be “100 percent skill”, and one of them is Cyclone. You know, the circle of lights that we pause at the exact moment to receive the jackpot with hundreds of tickets. If Cyclone truly is pure skill, then if someone removes the human factor and creates a high-precision button, it should be cleaned out in a matter of minutes, right?
The experiment
Well… no, false. After revealing the tricks behind carnival games, Mark Rober built a mini robot based on Arduino hardware, a photoresistor, a solenoid, and a custom pack of AA batteries. On the software side, a mobile app allows him to adjust the delay between the photoresistor's light reception and the activation of the button. The whole device was “camouflaged” with a bag, so it sits on the button without raising suspicion. In Rober's own words, the results were disappointing: The button worked wonderfully, but Cyclone only delivered jackpots every 30 games on average. After ruling out errors in the mini robot's construction and verifying its calibration, only one possibility remained: Cyclone cheats.
The proof
This was confirmed by locating a copy of the official Cyclone manual from the '90s. Page 31 explains that “mode 35” allows the owner to specify the number of games that must pass before a jackpot is given. In short, Cyclone exploits the so-called “near-miss effect”, causing people to spend more money because they are convinced they will hit it on the next try.
