Came to post Chubby Cheese. Alas, a day late and a ticket short. 
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The hardest part was keeping people from shoving coins into the VCR after it was plugged in.
As someone who used to work as a programmer at a video slot producer, I can tell you with 100% certainty that they do have a real-deal, totally fair PRNG controlling the reels. Where the odds are stacked against the player is that the reels are hundreds of symbols long, with each high value symbol being super rare on one of the reels. The odds are exactly what it says on the tin, which favors the house. Now, it is true that the PRNG does its thing for all reels the moment the player presses the button, and all the animation after that is just “for entertainment purposes only,” leading to a foregone conclusion. The reason for that is that casino employees have a habit of running the machines after hours, hoping to partially roll back the game state by unplugging the machine faster than it can write the state of the reel that just stopped on the wrong symbol to persistent memory. To prevent that attack, the random roll has to be done atomically, before any output is displayed.
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I should’ve specified that most of our slots ran on bingo patterns, so while it’s true that there is actual chance a play, their reels have nothing to do with it. And I can’t really speak for your second point since our casino A) Was always open so it had no “after hours” and B) Employees weren’t allowed to gamble at their own casino; and at other casinos they wouldn’t have the keys to access the power.
That said I do disagree with the notion that the odds are on the “tin” when, as you say, the actual variables are much more numerous and obfuscated than the game visually let’s on; unless your games had the actual odds printed on them (ours did not).
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