Born of a San Francisco mechanic’s tinkering in the late 1800s, slot machines have gone through a multitude of phases and incarnations.
Among slot machines’ phases are:

• They’ve been used as business builders on shopkeepers’ counters, sometimes dispensing sticks of chewing gum or golf balls instead of cash.
• They’ve been relatively inexpensive entertainment for spouses or significant others to amuse themselves in casinos while their partners were doing the real gambling at the tables.
• They’ve been mechanical, clockwork devices.
• They now are high-tech marvels combining animation, film clips, Surround Sound and motion chairs for special effects.

It’s rare that you’ll find minimum wagers of less than $5 a hand in Las Vegas casinos, and even $5 tables can be scarce. At busy times at premium properties, you might be looking at minimum bets of $25 and up. Slot machines offer the low rollers a chance to play for much less. For example, some 1-cent video slots have 30 paylines, meaning lines across the video reels on which you’re paid if matching symbols line up. If you bet 1 cent on each payline, then your wager is 30 cents per spin of the reels, far, far less than any table minimum you’ll find in a casino.

SLOTS OFFER BIG JACKPOT CHANCES

The allure of big money is a strong attraction, and big money is possible on the slots. It’s possible to win thousands of dollars, even millions on some games, with one lightningstrikes lucky spin. The largest slot jackpot in history, $39.7 million, came on a $3 bet on a $1 denomination International Game Technology Megabucks machine at the Excalibur casino in Las Vegas in 2003. Such large jackpots are extraordinarily rare events, but any dedicated slot player occasionally collects winnings of hundreds of times the size of the bet. It might not be millions, but a $300 win for a 30-cent bet is the kind of thrill that keeps slot players coming back.

SLOTS ARE FUN

The advent of computerized video slots (or online slots) has set game designers’ imaginations free, and slotmakers spend tremendous amounts of time and money developing interactive, entertaining slots games that will give you a good time even when you’re not winning. Whether you’re taking control of a video racecar to try to get to the head of the pack for extra rewards in NASCAR, picking gift boxes at party time to collect rewards in the longtime player favorite Jackpot Party, or having your picture taken and actually becoming part of the game as a reel symbol in TMZ, you’re taking an active role. If you want a game where you just sit back and watch the reels spin, they’re still around. But more and more, the emphasis on games that are fun as well as a chance to win.

There were coin-operated gaming devices before San Francisco mechanic Charles Fey invented the Liberty Bell in 1895, but it’s with the Liberty Bell that the line that leads to modern slots begins. Fey devised a game with three spinning reels, a handle on the side, and a slot in which to drop coin.

Among the game’s features were:

• Five different symbols were used on the reels – horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts and a Liberty Bell.
• There was a single payline across the middle of the display.
• The top payoff came for lining up three Liberty Bells.
• The top jackpot was tiny by today’s standards – 10 nickels, or U.S. five-cent pieces, meaning a total jackpot of half a dollar.

The design was simple, elegant, and long-lasting. You can still find three-reel games in today’s casinos, though they’re driven electronically rather than by handle-initiated cogs and gears. If you placed the Liberty Bell in today’s casinos, it would immediately be recognizable as a slot machine.

A Chicago manufacturer, Herbert Mills, introduced a three-reel slot machine called the Operator Bell in 1907. Mills was a leader in coin-operated devices, which included:

• A movie-viewing machine called the Autosteroscope.
• An ice cream making vending machine.
• Machines for dispensing Coca-Cola, both in bottles and cups.

Mills machines were the most widespread early slots, and it was Mills who first put fruit symbols on the games. The fruit symbols have been so durable that in some nations, including the United Kingdom, slot games are referred to as “fruit machines.”

RISE OF BALLY

Another Chicago company was founded in 1932 as Lion Manufacturing.
One of its early successes was a pinball game known as the BallyHoo, and the company name was changed to Bally Manufacturing. In later years, it changed to Bally Technologies, moved its offices to Las Vegas, and today is part of Scientific Games. Several years after the legalization of gambling in Nevada, Bally positioned itself to challenge Mills for the slot machine leadership. Its first real slot was of the trade stimulator variety. The Bally Baby was a tiny countertop model that dispensed award cards to be exchanged for chewing gum.

The large majority of slot machines in use today are on video screens instead of using mechanical reels. Early video slots, available in the 1980s, tried to mimic the three-reel experience, and they weren’t at all successful. To attract players, video slots needed to offer a different play experience. In the U.S., the first time slot games with video representations of spinning reels game when Bally introduced the Game Maker in 1994. It included slot, video poker and video blackjack games on the same unit. The slot games even developed a following, rare for the time. Poker and blackjack had carved out followings on a video format, but the Game Maker was the first machine where video slot games achieved a degree of popularity. Bonusing slots from Aristocrat and then WMS followed, and the popularity of video took off. Today, video slots dominate international markets. And even in the United States, which has a longer stronger tradition of mechanical games, video
slots make up more than 80 percent of modern casino slot floors.

THE COIN HOPPER

When Bally engineers Frank Nicolaus and Bud Breitenstein invented the motor-driven hopper, it revolutionized slot play. Here’s why the hopper was so important:

• Earlier slot machines used coin tubes. They were rigid; coins had to be stacked in them.
• Space inside the machines limited how many coins tubes could hold, and that put severe restrictions on how many coins could be paid out before the tubes had to be refilled.
• The coin hopper, first used on the Money Honey electromechanical slot in 1963, the coin hopper enabled slots to circulate coins for payouts from a large pool.
• The larger pool of coins meant payouts could be bigger, initially up to 500 coins at a time. Later hoppers could circulate more than 1,000 coins.

Nicolaus and Breitenstein’s brainchild enabled gamemakers to design games with larger, more frequent payoffs.

That was a game changer for many reasons:

• Big jackpots require big odds against winning, and increasing odds require increasing the number of possible combinations of symbols and spaces.
• Before the virtual reel, the main solution toward increasing the number of stops on a slot machine reel was to increase the size of the reel.
• Because reels had to fit inside a machine’s casing, gamemakers could go only so far in increasing the number of stops and combinations.
• Telnaes’ virtual reel meant game designers could make the reel behave as if it had any number of symbols and spaces. A reel with one jackpot symbol and two triple bars, for example, could be mapped so the triple bars came up 10 times as often as the jackpot symbol, while still leaving a random game.
• More stops mean more flexibility for game designers to give us games with high volatility, low volatility, big jackpots, frequent jackpots and everything in between. IGT Technology was quick to take advantage, as were other manufacturers who licensed the technology from IGT.

Without it the virtual reel big-money games like International Game Technology’s Megabucks wouldn’t have been possible, nor would even games that we today think of as having moderate jackpots.

LINKED PROGRESSIVE JACKPOTS

Slot machines with progressive jackpots add a portion of each wager to the jackpot amount until somebody wins it. Afterward, the jackpot resets to the starting amount and starts building again.

The first progressives were single-machine jackpots. They were followed by linked progressives, which electronically link multiple games so that a bet on any of the machines raises the jackpot available to all. The extreme version of the linked progressive is the wide-area progressive, and that’s where you’ll find the biggest jackpots. Wide-areas link not only neighboring machines, but machines in different casinos.

The first wide-area progressive game was IGT Megabucks, which launched in 1986, and the Nevada Megabucks link, which links machines throughout the state, including the dozens of casinos in Las Vegas, is the world’s longest-running link. It was on a Megabucks machine that the world-record jackpot of $39 million was won in 2003.

THE BILL VALIDATOR

If you were playing slots before the early 1990s, you remember games where you dropped in coins by hand for every pull. The bill validator changed all that.

No longer does a $20 investment in the slots mean dropping in 80 quarters, one by one. Instead, just slide a $20 bill into a reader to get 80 credits on a meter, and play off the credits.

Today’s bill validators must scan bar-coded payout tickets as well as currency, and must offer increasing flexibility to meet casino demands for rapid recognition of currency and detection of counterfeit money.

Developers of cash handling solutions have devised validators programmable and adaptable to different size notes to read currencies from nations around the world.

Before the late 1990s, most slot payoffs came on coins dispensed by the machine. Today, most payoffs come in bar-coded tickets as ticket printers have replaced coin hoppers.
When you cash out, you push a button, a ticket prints out, and you then can either use the ticket to buy credits in another machine or take it to a kiosk or the cashier’s cage to exchange the ticket for cash.

There are players who miss the sights and sounds of coins pouring out of slot machines, clanking and clattering into trays. But there are advantages both for casinos and players in using the tickets:

• Payout by bar-coded ticket made hopper jams and fills a thing of the past. There is no more down time while waiting for an attendant to clear the jam or pour a huge bag of coins into the machine.
• Ticket printers also made possible the introduction of small-denomination slots and games with dozens of paylines. Small coins jam hoppers frequently, and manufacturers weren’t about to introduce multiline 1-cent games until ticket printers were approved by regulators.
• Modern printers also can serve operators as promotional devices, capable of printing coupons or vouchers right at the slot machine.
• Use of printers means casinos don’t have to tie up huge sums of money in keeping coins in stock.

MULTI-GAME MACHINES

Installing multiple games on the same machine and allowing players to choose by touching an on-screen icon is common today, but the format didn’t exist a couple of decades ago. The innovation came from Bally, which introduced the Game Maker in 1994.
The Game Maker included slot, video poker and video blackjack games on the same unit. The slot games even developed a following, rare for the time. Poker and blackjack had carved out followings on a video format, but the Game Maker was the first machine where video slot games really worked. The success of multigame machines such as IGT’s GameKing can thank the Game Maker for blazing the trail.

SLOTS BONUS WHEELS

When Anchor Gaming introduced Wheel of Gold in 1995, it was a sensation. Players had never experienced anything like the bonus wheel that now is a reliable tool in the slot designer’s kit. The original wheel was affixed on a tower atop Bally slant-top slot machines, and was a sensation. When the tone sounded signaling an upcoming spin, everyone in the vicinity stopped to watch, to see where the wheel would stop and how many bonus credits the player would win. IGT’s Wheel of Fortune followed, and today many manufacturers use bonus wheels as extras on their games.

MULTI-LINE VIDEO SLOTS WITH BONUS PLAY

The Pacific Rim was the proving ground for what has become the hottest gaming trend of the last 15 years.

• Australian manufacturer Aristocrat Technologies was having big success overseas with games on video screens with multiple paylines.
• WMS Gaming had the first mega-success in the U.S. in 1997 with Reel ’Em In. There were just five paylines ---- three across the five video lines, a “v” and a chevron. When three matching fishing lure symbols appeared on screen, the video reels faded and were replaced by a scene of fishermen on a lake. Players touched the screen to choose an angler to reel in a fish for bonus credits. Such bonusing, in varied, creative, entertaining forms, is a key to modern slot popularity.
• Today, video slots dominate casino floors. From that five-line, second screen beginning we’ve seen the format grow to 9, 15, 20 even 100 lines, 243 ways-to-win games such as Aristocrat’s Reel Power slots, multi-tiered jackpots, mystery bonuses and community style play. Now that’s an innovation.