Arcades were big dark noisy rooms, and quite often had only one or two people on staff who were usually either busy dealing with other customers and were paid far too little to care about the owners' profit margins. They were basically there to hand out prizes to little kids for the ticket machines and make sure nobody walked out with Dig Dug on a hand cart.
In our case the arcades was in a ajourning room to our local cinema with no staff present and no CCTV so we had plenty of time to fiddle with the machines.
