OK, so I have had a machine in my collection forever. It is an all original Watling Rol-A-Top with the Tic Tac Toe pay feature. I bought this machine from the original owner's family up In Wyoming. I also have the original shipping crate it came in.
Anyway, it has just sat on display in my collection for decades and I have only seen a couple other examples.
A friend of mine contacted me the other day and he had just purchased one and noticed the award card says it pays 5 coins on cherry cherry bell / lemon. However there is no cutout in the disc for the bell / lemon and the machine pays 5 coins on cherry cherry anything.
He said he has a friend in France who has the machine and his machine is like this as well.
I went and looked at my machine and sure enough, there is no cutout for bell / lemon on the 3rd disc and sure enough it pays 5 coins on cherry cherry anything.
I know of two other TTT Rats so I contacted those owners. They were also not aware of this but confirmed it on their machines.
So, the question is why would Watling do this. I guess there are a couple of reasons.
1. Watling was too cheap to make up a new award card.
2. Watling did this on purpose to make people think the machine was being too generous and thus cause people to play it even more.
This is a very late model Rol-A-Top and maybe Watling changed the payout to be more with the times of other machines. This is also the only RAT that I have ever seen which has silver back reel strips and a barrel lock on the backdoor.