A scene in the 1980 movie Popeye involves Wimpy and Swee’Pea going to bet on the horses. Except, the horses are actually a mechanical contraption where a carny turns a gear. Cue lulz.
Was there ever such a thing? Or was it invented solely for the movie?
On the subject of mechanical horse racing games, in Japan I saw one that had horses moving along a magnetic track while the bettors sat around it. Is anyone familiar with the name of this game? I want one of those machines!
Sigma Derby exists. Barely.
Here’s a small “parlor” version of the same game:
About 60 years ago, my family had a horse racing game.
As I recall there was a piece of sturdy cloth which you attached to a table-top. At one end of the cloth there were ‘clamps’ and the other end had strong thick rubber bands.
Somehow there was a ‘winding device’ (this was a long time ago, so I don’t remember the details!) which made the cloth vibrate in one direction.
There were small china racehorses in different colours and they would bounce along the track.
My parents gave me a battery-powered horse racing game, in which tiny plastic horses would be randomly “jittered” to the finish line. This was back in the 1970’s, but Amazon still sells something very similar.
Looks like the one at the D which I finally got to play last year, at early am o’clock.
Didn’t MGM Grand (the current one) also have one?
Absolutely. There’s something similar in the Musée des Arts Forains in Paris,
and there was a domestic game that’s turned up a couple of times on the Repair Shop
I remember in carnivals in my home town, typically the Rose Festival carnival in June, they always had at least one booth with this kind of thing. I tried it once, but I got no sense of fun out of it. This was in the 1960s and earlier.
I worked at a casino that had a Sigma or similar horse racing machine. Broke down a lot. None of us techs were ever allowed to touch it. Only the company tech. Always wanted to see the guts of the thing and the manuals.
It was always full. The noisiest bunch of players and spectators in the place. I always suspected that a lot of side betting was going on.
Casino here had one. Might still have it. I walk through it every few years at most, so have no current idea.
What always bothered me was that there is no apparent mechanism that suggests true random outcomes or resistance to tampering.
I guess most punters put up with computer based slot machines, so they don’t really care. But a huge mechanical contrivance with unknown underlying mechanisms that is supposed to be random?
Casinos have a mix of desires. An honest one wants assurances that punters can’t detect biases and make use of them. Dishonest ones will rig the system to avoid losses on big bets.
I believe they got rid of theirs and the one at the D is the last one in operation.
There’s now a modernized version of it, though;
It probably works on the same basic method as modern slots.
Stepper motors.
We imagined that each horse was on a belt with its own stepper motor. You send pulses to each motor based on a random number generated in software. The house may take a percentage of total money bet. So which horse wins is not a concern to the house. Maybe. Not positive of that.
For slots it is more important on the number of wins per machine. But the concept is the same. Random number generation sent to control motors, But with a coded average percentage to the house. The horse race always has a winner. So just take your cut each race, It may be more complicated than that to give the house more profit. But it does not have to be.
The way Derby slots work is that there are five horses and you bet on which pair of them will come in first and second, in either order. There are therefore ten possible outcomes for each race. Before each race the LED board shows you the odds that each pair will pay off on a successful bet, from 2 (I.e 1 credit pays 2 credits on a win) up to 200 IIRC, and you can bet on as many combos as you want.
In my limited experience playing them the pairs with odds of 2 or 3 or 4 usually win, but I imagine the higher numbers must pay off now and then.
Interesting.
It is possible to preset the random number generator for a particular horse. Maybe even randomly do it and present that as odds. Which would actually narrow the randomness of the outcome to some extent. But still allow for variations. Even longshots. It would add more realism to the machine.
The restoration reality show Repair Shop (UK) had just such a horse racing set in one of the episodes. I reckon it was around 60 years old.
More on Sigma Derby:
Escalado - that’s the game I remember! 
Thank you.
A quinella. Makes sense, as I doubt that a mechanical table could manage all the available bets in real horse racing, and there are many nowadays, between straights, exotics, and parlays. Quinellas are simple to understand, and to bet: “Woodbine, in the second, $2 quinella 3 and 5.” It’s just that easy.
When I first started going to Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto, forty-plus years ago, quinellas were only ever featured on the second race, weirdly.
Let’s end the hijack here. I’ve seen horse racing machines in operation in Las Vegas, but I’ve never played them. They’re fun to watch, however.
A home version of such a mechanical horse race plays an important part in the Stephen King novel Needful Things
Of course, it’s in the movie, too:
Evidently the version in the film was a prop built for the film:
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/needful-things-1992-stephen-king-497613032