You then took that clicker to your local arcade, and clicked one of the corners of the CRT, that would send a shock through the system and add credits to your game. I believe this was because the CRT was grounded on the same ground lines that the mechanism for physically checking a coin had gone through the system.
Suffice to say, they caught onto this over time, and added some form of an alarm into it. But up until then... Those were truly the best times.
I think they still use these in bars