Fruit Machine Chat

Two questions prompted by the old 'Underground' game still lurking in Gatwick Airport:

(1) Who knows of the oldest machine still in service somewhere? Is there a Give Us a Break or a Blockbuster lurking in a chippy or students union somewhere? My own vote would be for a pizza place in Southampton which has the driving-themed game where you fill up four columns of coloured arrows to reach either £5 (50p game) or £20 (£1 game) and collect traffic cones along the way as a bonus. Can't remember what it's called but it must be around 10 years old

(2) What happened to all the old single game cabinets? Were they simply scrapped or are they still being kept somewhere?

That was called Fruit Pursuit I think and it came out about '98. I'll go older, since I know where there is an original Crystal Maze still being played in a kebab shop in Crewe (or was a couple of months ago anyway), which was about '94 I think.

Think most of the old single cabinet machines appear on Ebay.

Talking of the guys who won £10,000 a friend of my won enough on Give Us A Break to to go to Blackpool and rape the whole town up there about 1986. There was only about 50 black ball questions in those days. Only four pubs in Reading had the machine and he ended up getted barred from them all.

I played a 94 crystal maze in a Norfolk take away last year on my hols, complete with a ketchup soaked roller ball :x

£20 Turnover in the chinese supermarket in Glasgow - honest!
20p a pop.Got about £8 last month.
QM has a better idea of chronology than I so I'll wait and see if I win a prize.
Oh God I'm really thinking of going to one of those crystal mazes just to see if I've still got it!! 60 gold 0 silver hundreds of times!!

There are some old ones in some Cambridge colleges, but they get rotated quite a lot, I think the company is paranoid someone will bum them otherwise. We had an Underground, then a Brainbox, then a Guinness Records, and another Maygay of some kind. Trivial Pursuit, Hangman, Strike it Rich, Countdown and Around the World have also been spotted.

£20 Turnover!. Foxy wins hands down. It pre-dates all those antiques in Cambridge College (the fact that it's 20p a go and they are all 50p gives that away). It's going to take a Give Us a Break to beat this. Unless Nil's Adders & Ladders is still in the terminal at Heathrow? That'd win - it was before Turnover.

Never seen any of the really old (pre-96) ones but there's an original Crystal Maze in the wholly unlikely surroundings of trendy gastropub The Gun on the Isle of Dogs in London, or at least there was six months ago or so.

Does anyone have any good locations for old Maygay standalones? By way of information sharing, there's an old Risk in the Sun In Splendour at the foot of Portobello Road, Notting Hill.

I'm sure the departure lounge of Alex Higgens International airport has a stand-alone poker quiz AND a crystal maze (but one of the later bumpy ones).

Luton Airport still has an old Maygay Risk and a JPM Monopoly (original, not deluxe), but since the redesign of the departure area they are trickier to find...!

Is it Pot black or give us a break, where you can get a mystery and they can all be "Miscue", which if i recalled happened to someone on about a 140 break once.

I can't remember the name, but there's one of them in scarborough.

drpepper wrote:Is it Pot black or give us a break, where you can get a mystery and they can all be "Miscue", which if i recalled happened to someone on about a 140 break once.

I can't remember the name, but there's one of them in scarborough.

I think that's Maygay's 'Big Break' IIRC. Playable but had its unfair moments - was definitely possible to get the £20 out of it though if it was in the mood.

2 questions your eminence.
1 - alex higgens airport?I've obviously missed something here.I could hazard a guess at the location but if you could just confirm.thanks.yes, i am vaguely aware of search engines but this seems more worthwhile somehow.
2 - the 'bumpy' ones re:crystal mazes. Now i am confused.Are we talking CM3 where they made things more difficult by adding an extra 20 gold as the minimum!!! or are we discussing the re-jigged original CM's with the famously inacheivable 51 golds.In a fit of utter paranoia the programmer saw fit to roughly half the time as well, as if putting up 51 gold wasn't going to be a sufficient detterent.
Anyway I'm going- wherever and whatever it is.Maybe.
Addendum:May I directly converse with the cardinal exclusively in french from now on.I feel it will allow him to express himself in a more fluent and precise manner which will be better for all of us surely.

Alors, Monsieur Renard. Je n'ai pas un problème avec parlant en francais, mais je plains les autres qui ne peuvent pas comprendre nos perles de la sagesse ...

Alex Higgins (now spelt correctly) International Airport is still called Belfast Aldergrove airport at the moment. But given that they've just named the other airport after another famous Northern Irish wifebeating alcholic, I confidently predict that whenever Higgin's shuffles off to the great corner pocket in the sky, the country will be so distraught that the only way of lifting it from their grief will be to rename the airport after him.

As for the Crystal Maze it was certainly an old version, but probably the newest old one... it had the puzzles where you had to balance the scales and choose which person was going to do the puzzles, which I'm sure wasn't in the previous incarnations. Despite several goes, I was unable to win el gordo.

This was about a year ago now, so who knows what other treasures may lie there.