I'm pretty sure many games cheated or you could only truly master them after you had spent way too many quarters (enough that any casual player wouldn't have an

I'm pretty sure many games cheated or you could only truly master them after you had spent way too many quarters (enough that any casual player wouldn't have any fun with them). There were also difficulty settings. I remember back then when we played TMNT (which mind you, it's one of the "fairer" games) we could tell which cabinets were "tweaked" at the highest difficulty level and avoided them. One tell was the highway levels, the way to truly win with one quarter was to avoid the helicopters instead of fighting them (which spawns more and more dangerous helis), but tweaked cabinets would spawn tons of helis no matter what you did, so it was best to avoid them. God I hated that. Other games had similar problems, but sometimes you could tell "this game is set to impossible difficulty".