Nowadays, you can't move in an arcade without tripping over the piles of tickets that spread from machines, as eager youths punt coin after coin into slots, in a desperate race to claim a deformed Spider-Man pencil-topper from a sullen arcade worker.
Early in the life of arcade gaming, games existed for fun alone, but nobody quite knew what the machines should look like.
Here's a selection of batshit insane early arcade machines, before they settled into their later, iconic, form.
Except... in among the stuff which made up most of his collection of rubbish were items he'd pilfered from various stage productions he'd worked on; costumes, and scenery, and his front room contained two huge dragon heads, which I thought were the coolest things ever.
Apropos nothing, one time he pooed his bed, and when my mum went in to help change his sheets she found an original copy of White Christmas by Bing Crosby. He also used to skin rabbits and hang them up in his kitchen...
Anyway, I was always fascinated with his telly, which was one of those really, really old sets in a massive cabinet, but with a tiny, black-and-white, screen. That's what this arcade machine reminds me of; a time when all consumer electronics were wooden.
For-Play's Star Trek was a clone of Computer Space, and doubled down on its IP-infringement by not only stealing the title of Gene Rodenberry's 60s sci-fi TV series, but also by plastering the Starship Enterprise all over the cabinet.
Fortunately, despite being only the second coin-op arcade game ever released, the game was fairly unsuccessful, and thus wasn't worth the time for anybody to sue over.
It had been designed by Allan Alcorn, the creator of Pong, as a way to separate Atari from its competitors, who at the time were mostly just ripping off Atari's own Pong.
It certainly did that.
Despite the furore which greeted this inexplicable decision - backed up by the above flyer artwork which seems to portray a scantily-clad young woman being manhandled by a young David Icke - and a later version, sans the booby-domes, which holds the distinction of being the first colour arcade game, Gotcha was a flop.
"You've watched it on TV... you've seen it in the papers... Now discover the secret combination and break into The Watergate yourself!" imported the accompanying literature.
"Watergate stimulates the larceny in all of us!"
Actually, I can stimulate my own larceny, thanks.
It's a bit like someone releasing an arcade game called Wikileaks, where you play Julian Assange. Actually, I'd probably play that.
Puppy Pong and Dr Pong were unaltered versions of Pong - beyond the fact they were free to play - which were designed for doctor's waiting rooms.
In the case of Puppy Pong, it was housed in a replica dog kennel, aimed at appealing to ailing children. Initially, Atari had approached Charles Schulz with a view to using his Snoopy character, but the Peanuts creator declined.
"Going to see Dr Pong" is now my go-to euphemism for visiting the lavatory.
It didn't matter where you were - the bath, the park, a high street; we were all on edge, believing that an unscheduled shark attack could occur at any second.
Inevitably, this spilled over into arcade games, with cabinets such as Maneater, capitalising shamelessly on the global shark obsession. To be fair, the biggest risk this machine posed wasn't being eaten, but slicing your forearms to ribbons on those fibreglass teeth.
That's about all I've got to say about Shark.
Shark!
Where?!?
Smaller and more delicate than the chunky cabinets that were the norm at the time, the Consolette also stood atop a pair of slender legs. You know: like a lady's supposed to have, apparently.
Worryingly, however, Atari chose to sell the purpose of the machine to potential customers with a stylised Consolette character with breasts: