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Buying rare sneakers, particularly Kanye West’s Yeezys, can be thought of as a game of chance. On Yeezy release day, a few lucky customers are welcomed through gilded doors where they can gratefully fork over at a minimum $200, leaving the rest of us in an at-best a functional digital queue—and at worst a site with a server buckling under all the traffic. But here’s some good news: You’re just as likely (and maybe even more likely) to get a pair of Yeezys from a literal game of chance—like, an actual arcade game—as you are by going through the proper channels. I don’t mean that as a metaphor: sneaker retailers are using a Sega arcade game called Key Master to bring customers into their stores, and stocking the game with precious streetwear grails. What they might not have expected is that the Key Master would turn into one of the best bets to score Yeezys—and potentially take money from those stores in the process.
You’ve no doubt seen the Key Master machine at your local movie theater or arcade: it has a plain white exterior—subtle for an arcade game—and about the size of a middle linebacker. Customers use a joystick to steer the “key,” and hit a bright blue button to make the key move forward, and hopefully straight into a waiting outline. If you fit it perfectly, you win. When the machine gets streetwear-ified, maybe three pairs of Yeezys and Jordans dangle in the machine.
That's the vibe at Snkrflea in New York, where, before customers get to the racks of Off-White, Supreme, and Givenchy, and the shelves of plastic-wrapped sneakers, they pass a Key Master machine. A kid named Taylor is here now; his nanny sits in the corner. He starts feeding the machine with $5 bills. Joe, who owns Snkrflea (and declined to give his last name), says Taylor wins a lot. “He has the eye-hand coordination of a fucking leopard because he plays Xbox all day" Joe says. Taylor’s won three pairs of Yeezys (over $2,000 in value, according to Joe), and also snagged $500 to buy anything in the store from Supreme.
Joe’s machine is relatively new, but he says that since September, he’s had approximately 58 winners. “It ends up being like $56,000,” he says of the hit he’s incurred. Joe says he’s definitely losing money on the machine but considers it a worthy cost of doing business. “[The expense] goes into my marketing budget anyway,” Joe explains. “Because if I were to spend $56,000 on marketing there's no way I can get 58 people to tell 10 friends who are gonna tell 10 friends that they won free shoes.”
The proprietors of other sneaker stores that operate these machines agreed that they’re doing it at a loss. Kevin Arora just opened Central Hype, a streetwear consignment shop in Illinois, on January 6th. In that time span, he’s had ten winners walk away with items like Yeezys, Pharrell’s Human Race sneakers, and a Supreme x Nas tee. “I mean, we could be losing money but half of the time it just almost, like, evens out,” Arora says. Evens out financially or evens out because of the other benefits the machine provides? “The benefits,” he says.
Arora says the machine brings new customers into the store—particularly younger ones who don’t have the money to buy these sneakers at inflated resale prices. “It's only a $1 play—you can't even buy gum for a dollar,” Arora says. “It's just giving a chance to give back to people, to have fun, to get a shoe at an affordable cost.” Owen Prucha, who recently won those Human Races at Central Hype, says he went in that day after school just to play, and walked out with a pair of shoes that go for roughly $400 on the secondary market (Prucha later sold the pair he won for $390).
Not everyone sees the game as an innocent way for kids to win sneakers, though. The sneaker reseller Corgishoe believes the games are exploitative. “[Stores with these machines] are beyond complicit,” Corgi tells me over email. “Those offering Key Masters are profiting off the deliberate attempt to misrepresent what the machine is. Look at who plays: kids, ages 10 to 15, mostly from lower-income areas. Think about that...”
Corgi directs me to a lawsuit that claims Sega intentionally misrepresents these machines as games of skills. Fred Isquith, who was handling the case for Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz, tells me they settled with Sega, which agreed to put a warning on the machines that these were games of luck, not skill. I saw no such notice on the machine at Snkrflea. And while the theory doesn’t match up with what retailers are saying—kids are winning expensive items, at least according to the retailers I spoke to—these machines are designed to profit the operator, not the customer. An arcade game vendor claims that the machine pays out $500 to $1,000 a month. When I ask Joe at Snkrflea about this, he waves it off. “Everybody has a conspiracy theory,” he says.
For his part, Joe only lets customers play the game after they’ve bought something in the store. He considers it a reward for a shopper’s business. I ask him to let me give the machine a spin anyway, for journalistic purposes. He declines on moral grounds, but eventually gives in, maybe because he pities the 27-year-old man begging to play an arcade game that spits out Yeezys. My moment finally comes: I grasp the joystick, and Joe tells me to pick a target before I start. He says everyone targets the Yeezys, so I do the same. And then I completely blew it. All I remember is Joe yelling at me, “Stop, stop, stop.” In the end, it was fitting: I came about as close to securing Yeezys as I do every time they release through official channels—which is to say I wasn’t even close.
