Fruit Machine Chat

Does anyone remember an old top of the pops machine that wasnt touchscreen?

They used to have it down my old golf club years ago. Basically you answered questions in each round. You always got to the final round but the number of questions you answered along the way correctly increased your time.

But every so often a question would come up that if you got right you got a "gold disc".

In the final game you started off at number ten (ish - it was a while ago) and had x amount of seconds (depending on how well you'd done to here) to get to number 1 and the jackpot. Correct answer = up a place, wrong = down 1 BUT the golden discs you collected meant if you got one wrong, the disc moved you up anyway. So 1 disc = 1 move up.

I was only about 16 but many a time we'd get 7 or 8 discs, answer the first easy questions to move up 2 spots then hammer the sh*t out of any answer quickly so we'd shoot up to number 1 for a tenner.

Easy money, sadly missed.

PS. Anyone played Pepsi Chart recently? Dr Fox is, was and always will be a twat.

That was indeed a great game. There was another variation on the same 'Lose to Win' theme, i.e. where bashing the wrong answers was all you needed to do if you had got enough bonuses, called 'I Love TV' (based on the BBC TV series) but I don't think that one was ever a standalone and it was a lot harder to get to the big prizes than on the old Top of the Pops machine.

As for Dr Fox, did you know that he's not a real doctor (or a real fox)?



He was however responsible for my most lucrative game ever, although sadly it has now all but disappeared.

I remember old TOTP fondly as well. I used the same strategy as both of you - whack anything when you had enough discs.

I quite like new TOTP, although you don't see it too much nowadays. Never won more than £8 on it though. Anyone JPed it?

The TOTP2 game was one of the last great games. £6-£8 was always a possibility and I certainly JPed it a few times, usually with the help of the 50-50 bonus. It survives on a few Ind:E cabinets I believe.

It also had a close relative, Gold Digger, which was equally as good for the mid-range prizes but usually went into spoiler mode before you got too close to the top. I'd actually forgotten about that one until now and yet it must only have been a couple of years ago when it was everywhere. It must be old age...

Original TOTP was pretty good. It was around the time of Telly Addicts and Radio Times - both corkers themselves.

Didn't much care for the new one - it was when BFG started out on their policy of asking multiple questions per move/points, since repeated in SNT and more recently DOND.

This pretty much gave it such a transparent feel that you knew you weren't going to win staright away when it started asking you 4-5 questions for 8000 points, when normally you'd get asked 2-3 questions for 16,000 pts.

That and there was a bloke running round who was a fucking memory stick at pop music at the time pretty much paid to it as any long term proposition.