Casino Player August 2022

PLAYING THE MACHINES

REEL DEAL

Social media influencer, Brian Christopher, unveiled Pop’N Pays More, a slot machine featuring his likeness and created by Las Vegas-based manufacturer Gaming Arts, at the Plaza Casino in Downtown Las Vegas on July 7.

Influencer on the Reels One of the first “slot influencers”gets his own slot machine ➤ by Frank Legato

B rian Christopher started putting his own slot sessions on video in 2016.The Canadian slot enthusiast endured his share of abuse at the hands of casino officials as he continued to record his sessions asYouTube videos, but he persisted. His videos began to gain steam,and eventually defined a new type of internet star—the“slot influencer.” Today,there are dozens of these young stars on Facebook,YouTube and private websites. Christopher, though, has remained the king of these new celebrities, live-streaming slot play on new games, hosting their own play with enthusiastic narration of wins, losses, bonuses and game features. Christopher, though, is arguably the king of this new genre of celebrities.HisYouTube channel BCSlots has some 479,000 subscribers and has logged a remarkable 318 million views since its 2016 launch. Christopher himself,who has some 41,500 Instagram followers,has be come a star.Millions of fans have watched his videos—the average view

time is a remarkable 18 minutes—and have become familiar with his fa vorite slots and any number of catch phrases he uses to get players ex cited about features of a given slot game. As you may have read last month in our sister publication Strictly Slots, slot manufacturer GamingArts has latched on to this trend by join ing with Christopher to design a new game themed around him and his popular slot shtick. On July 7, Christopher himself launched the new game, Brian Christopher’s Pop’N Pays More, at the Brian Christopher slot zone at the Plaza in Downtown Las Vegas. Even if you’ve never followed Christopher online, the game is a lot of fun. It fits right in with GamingArts’ Pop’N Pays series. Christopher says he was involved in designing the game from start to finish.“Pop’N Pays was already a hit among my fans, so when they asked me about partnering on a new version, I jumped on it,” he told Strictly Slots .“They had already worked out what they wanted for their other iterations of Pop’N Pays More—Piñatas Ole and BigTop—and al

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