How to Hack Coney Island arcade


This article was written as revenge for making us wait in line for 10
minutes just to be told that we had to go to a machine, get a receipt,
then get back in line. Please don't take this too seriously. Who says
I don't have a sense of humor?


The "CONEY ISLAND EMPORIUM" arcade at the New York, New York hotel and
casino in Las Vegas, Nevada has a major flaw in their prize system.

The arcade is your standard midway type where most of the games spit out
little coupons with bar codes on the back that you can redeem for prizes.
The more coupons, the bigger and better prizes.

I stuck a quarter into one of the games and it spat out a bunch of coupons,
cool, so I stuck in another and another dozen or so tickets spat out.  So
we take these 2 dozen or so tickets to the counter after waiting in line
for 10 minutes to get a piece of plastic crap, they said we had to go to
their "Smile machine" and get a receipt, then wait again. We were not happy.
So we went over to the "smile machine" and took a look at it. It's a box,
about 3 feet tall, 2 feet wide and a foot deep with a slot for accepting
the coupons. You feed it the coupons and it counts up on a display. When
finished, you hit a button and it spits out a receipt that you then use to
get your prize. Well, as bored as we were we all thought the same thing at
the same time, "if it reads the bar code, how much of the bar code does it
need?"

Answer: Not a lot.

By carefully tearing the tickets in half length-wise and feeding the half
coupon on the right side, you can successfully double your tickets and get
better prizes. The vulnerability is that it reads the bar code with a wide
scanner that doesn't check the width of the ticket.

I would expect that the hotel would figure this out soon by the sheer amount
of torn tickets in the machine.


This article is meant to bring down the cost on getting the really good
prizes and making those coupons worth more.


                              07/25/99

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