It's definitely not random, because arcade games are never random. They're usually worse than random. Whatever its position on a "game of chance" vs. "game of skill" spectrum, the machine has rules about how much winning the customers are allowed to get away with, and/or how much profit it's supposed to generate in a day; once the threshold is crossed, it'll happily interfere with your play to guarantee you lose.
Like, you thought you suck at reaction time games despite playing them a lot, because you always hit the button a split second too late or too early? Your reaction time was likely stellar - it's the game code that rejected your hit and animated it as near-miss. You'd never know without a high-speed camera - but these days those are ubiquitous, and YouTube has plenty of recordings of games cheating this way.
It's one of those things you learn as an adult and realize that people suck much more than you thought when you were a kid.
Like, you thought you suck at reaction time games despite playing them a lot, because you always hit the button a split second too late or too early? Your reaction time was likely stellar - it's the game code that rejected your hit and animated it as near-miss. You'd never know without a high-speed camera - but these days those are ubiquitous, and YouTube has plenty of recordings of games cheating this way.
It's one of those things you learn as an adult and realize that people suck much more than you thought when you were a kid.