Casino Player December 2022

PLAYING THE MACHINES

REEL DEAL

Back to Basics The mechanical reel-spinning slot machine continues to prove itself popular with players

➤ by Frank Legato

F or a century, the perception of what constituted a slot machine remained the same—three physical spinning reels,a simple pay schedule displayed on the front with bar symbols, 7s and fruit symbols. Certainly,changes were made along the way to enhance the game. Slot handles gave way to spin buttons. (Some still like the handles, but these days,all handles do is hit an internal spin button.) Coins gave way to bill acceptors and credit play, eliminating the coin slot—which was the origin of the term“slot machine.”Ticket in/ticket out operation made credit play even easier. Single paylines gave way to games with three, five or nine paylines. But mechanical spinning reels and simple pay schedules remained at the core of the slot machine.Then, in the mid-1990s, a new type

By the early 2000s, the popular culture themes in video slots were everywhere, as were bonuses that followed the theme.The Beverly Hillbillies.Gilligan’s Island.Playboy.Betty Boop.Popeye.M*A*S*H. Around

the same time, many casino industry pundits began pre dicting that the rise of popular video slots would soon re sult in the demise of traditional mechanical reel-spinners. Seriously. Professionals who I had known since the 1980s were predicting that mechanical reel-spinners would be extinct by 2010. I never believed them. Part of my opinion was due to the fact that, despite all the new elaborate bonuses and comical animated sequences,me chanical reel-spinners were the style of game to which I always returned. After all, how many times do you laugh at a joke that keeps repeating itself? Howmany times do you look at a bonus drawing on aTV show you love before it be comes tiresome?That’s one reason most of those games have disappeared. In the end, slot machines are about gambling and winning money. That’s what the reel-spinners are all about—work ing to beat the house edge by bankrolling your game, searching for that big payoff. Well, it looks like I was right after all. Gilligan’s Island, Popeye— those are the games that are now extinct.The reel-spinners—Wheel of Fortune, Double Diamond,Top Dollar, Quick Hit—those are the games that have survived. Many of the slot manufacturers eventually realized that this genre of game was still wildly popular,and that the reel-spinning market had been underserved for years.

of slot machine began to take hold, first with so-called “Australian-style”video slots,with their poker symbols (they’re still called“pokies”inAustralia),encyclopedic pay schedules, and paylines that began with nine and evolved to 45 lines, even 100 lines. Then there were the bonus events. Reel-symbol triggers would enact a“game within a game”—a pick ing event, or a second-screen event related to the theme of the slot machine.Though these secondary bonus events may have originated with the Aus tralian pokies, U.S. slot manufacturers quickly jumped on the bandwagon with themed bonuses. The mechanical reel-spinners would start, with games like Wheel of Fortune and its venerable roulette-style bonus wheel. Other reel-spinners would follow suit, but video slots were the venue where elaborate themed bonus events would reach their apex. For U.S. manufacturers, it started with the WMS game Reel ’Em In.The second-screen bonus depicted fishermen (and fisherwomen) on a lake, making hilarious wisecracks with Chicago accents (WMS was located in Chicago) as they dropped their lines into the water,“fishing” for bonuses. IGT would soon follow with games like Lucky Larry’s Lobstermania and its funny“Buoy Bonus,”and soon, animated bonus features were all the rage.

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