When I worked for an operator in the 1970s, one of the first things we did after we unpacked and set up a new GTB machine was to grab a pair of diagonal cutters and clip off all of the coin lockout wires.

Given the high quality of most of GTB engineering, I never understood how they could have put such an atrocious coin lockout mechanism on their coin doors. That mechanism would invariably fail within 3 months of location use, causing a perfectly good game to reject all attempts to put money into it.

Our locations were always glad to give customers a refund if someone lost money in one of our machines. Since we reimbursed those refunds back to the location, we knew the extent that people were losing money. After we started routinely removing the GTB coin lockout wires, there was absolutely no difference in our refund rates. From that experience, I am skeptical that pingame coin lockouts provide much practical benefit.

- TimMe