- Evolution Of The Slot Machines
- Evolution Of The Slot Machine
- Free Slots Machine
- Evolution Of Slot Machines
Interestingly, it was the Slot Machines, at least a concept inherent in them, that led to one of the more profound evolution's with respect to Table Games: The Side Bet. One component that Slot Machines had that Table Games were missing was the potential for a large jackpot which was significantly more than the amount bet.
If you’ve ever been to a casino before, you’ll understand why slot machines are so popular. Even to this day after being invented way back in the 19th century, they’re still one of the most popular casino games in the world. Some say about 30% of casino profits come from them alone . Available at land based casinos and online, they’re everywhere, and there are thousands of games to select from.
With a huge international appeal, people call these machines differently around the globe. For example, in Australia they call them “pokies”. The reason is because the symbols on the first machine were poker symbols. In England, some people call them “fruit machines” since a lot of the classic ones had fruit symbols on them. Regardless of the name, they’re a huge hit all over the globe and have come a long way over the years. With so much history in the making of these machines, we find it interesting to discuss the history of slot machines: invention, evolution & future. We’ll be focusing on topics such as who invented slot machines, the evolution as well as 3D slots.
Who Invented Slot Machines
As we get ready to discuss who invented slot machines, it’s important for us to mention that the dates we’re using are approximations. We’ll also be talking about a controversial subject on who was the first person to invent this machine.
In any case, it is clear that the early beginnings can be seen going back to the 19th century. It is believed that Sitmann and Pitt from Brooklyn, New York came out with the first gambling machine back in 1891. This gambling machine isn’t the slot machine you’re probably used to, but is more similar to a poker machine, as the symbols are cards and the concept it poker. On the machine are 5 drums holding 50 cards faced down. Instead of pressing a button, the machine was equipped with a lever you would need to pull after placing money inside. Afterwards, the drums would spin the cards, and the object was to land a strong poker hand. The rewards from these machines were not automatic. Instead the prize could be something like a beer from the bar it was available at.
From the poker machine we discussed, many people believe the very first slot machine wasn’t invented until 1895 by a guy named Charles Fey in California. His machine (the Liberty Bell) is the original design having only three reels, but had the ability to trigger payouts automatically. Unlike the card based game that Sitmann and Pitt came out with, Fey’s machine included other symbols such as horseshoes and liberty bells. These symbols would need to line up in order to create a winning payout. His success with this machine design was so big that other competitors eventually copied him. With gaining popularity, people started calling it the one-armed bandit as the design featured a lever on the side. With much success, Fey ended up opening the Slot Machine Factory in 1896. Nowadays the original Liberty Bell machine cannot be played anymore, but can be found on display at the museum in Reno.
Evolution of Slot Machines
These gambling machines have come a long ways and have a pretty long history. Before we get ready to talk about the evolution of slot machines you should know by now that they were a lot different from the typical machine you’ll see at the casino today. With the launch of electronic machines, you don’t even have to pull the lever down to spin the reels anymore, but instead you can activate them by simply pressing a button. You’ll also notice that a majority of them now have 5 reels on them instead of the classic 3 that was first introduced. Speaking of all the changes, let’s go ahead and take a look at the evolution of them over the years.
- 1891 – The year Sitmann and Pitt invented the first gambling machine.
- 1895 – The year Charles Fey invented the first slot machine featuring automatic payouts and 3 reels. The biggest win from this machine back then was a whopping ten nickels and was called the Liberty Bell.
- 1907 – After slots were banned in 1902, a new machine came out by a man named Herbert Mills. This is where the first fruit symbols appeared on the reels, and instead of having cash prizes, the payout prizes were in the forms of sweets, such as chewing gum.
- 1963 – the first electromechanical machine was introduced by Bally. It was called Money Honey and the reels were electronic, however you still needed to pull the lever in order to spin the reels. It was also able to make automatic payouts for up to 500 coins. After a while, after gaining more popularity, the lever was removed from the machine and was replaced with a button.
- 1976 – was the year the very first video slot was invented. It was created in California by a company in Las Vegas called Fortune Coins. The original machine had a Sony television to display the videos on the machine and was first featured at the Hilton Hotel in Vegas. Not very long after the machine gained much success and was being spotted in almost every hotel on the Vegas strip.
- 1994 – the big year where the very first online casino introduced video slots. From that year onward, it’s been a huge success in the gaming industry and is being played by millions of people from all over the world, without having to go to a casino.
- 1996 – was the year the first video slot came out with a second screen of a bonus round. After a bonus round was activated, a new screen would appear with a bonus game for a chance to win more. These new machines also contributed about 70% of the income from casinos.
- 2012 – There was a study done in England concluding that the citizens there spent approximately 5 billion pounds on their video slots, both online and on the casino floors. Keep in mind, this study was done on just this country alone, so imagine how much more it would be if the study included the entire world.
3D Slots
From the very first gambling machine that came out in the 19th century, to a whole new generation of 3D video slots. These 3D slots we created in order to make the video screen as much 3D as possible. These machines are available online and at land based casinos, and they do not require any special glasses, which is why the designers are trying to create the symbols and characters as life like as they can. The art on these slots are look so real sometimes it almost feels like their popping out at you. With the graphics being so well designed, there’s a lot of work that comes in place from the artists. These games are pretty similar to video slots except for the extremely high-quality graphics they have. The slots are very appealing. They’re the latest of the latest and a good indicator that the slot industry continues to advance and grow more each day.
After taking a look at the evolution of slot machines, it’s awesome to see how far they’ve come, and how they continue to progress. With technology continuing to evolve, and them still being very popular, there’s just no telling what could be introduced next. It’s amazing how such a simple machine became huge in the entertainment industry.
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Evolution Of The Slot Machines
You might click on a video slot with multiple bonus features and a huge progressive jackpot and assume slots have always been that way.
You’d be wrong about that. As a matter of fact, the virtual machines we all love to spin have been through quite a journey. They have a story reaching back to the turn of the last century and a future which is almost unimaginable. As you’ll see here, the evolution of slot machines is a heck of a story.
Let’s take a look at how slots have evolved step by step to their present-day form. If nothing else, this will help you appreciate just how great some of the current online video slots really are.
The First Slot Machines
It goes without saying that they didn’t have web connections and mobile devices back in the early days of slot machines.
Evolution Of The Slot Machine
The first version of the slot machine was invented by an American inventor of Bavarian origin named Charles August Fey in 1894. A year later, in 1895, Fey placed one of his early machines in a local saloon, and it was a massive hit.
Realizing he was onto something, Fey quit his job as a mechanic and opened a factory producing more machines. By 1898, he was producing the “Card Bell,” the first three-reel slot which paid out automatically. It showed poker hands, hence its name.
The next year, Fey built the Liberty Bell, which is considered the first slot machine proper. Symbols included horseshoes, bells, and card suits. The story of the evolution of slot machines had taken its first step.
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Interesting Fact:It’s estimated that only four original Liberty Bell machines exist today. Most of them were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake in 1906.
Fey’s competitors soon started copying his idea, and by 1910, there were over 3,000 slot machines in San Francisco alone. This was when the church and the law began to get involved, raising questions about whether slot machines were ethical.
Evolution Of Slot Machines
In order to evade the eyes of the law, early pioneers like the Industry Novelty Company and Mills Novelty Company started making games with fruit symbols, marketing them as chewing gum dispensers.
They probably didn’t know it at the time, but this was a huge step in the evolution of slot machines, and the fruit and bar symbols (meant to symbolize a packet of chewing gum) they used in those early days would come to be the standard for most of the next century.
Throughout the roaring 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s, slot machines continued to proliferate across the USA, even though they were banned almost everywhere except Nevada from 1931 onwards. The ban was almost total by the 1950s, although since slots were mostly run by organized crime gangs, it hardly mattered. Nothing could stop the evolution of slot machines and their increasing popularity.
As with all attempts at prohibition, world governments eventually realized how much tax revenue they were missing out on and began to slowly legalize and regulate slot machines. This led to a new period of innovation, taking us to the next stage in the evolution of slot machines.
The Electromechanical Slot Machine
By the 1950s, technology had come on leaps and bounds, driven partly by two World Wars and partly by the natural course of time. This allowed for the rise of electromechanical slots which offered all sorts of new payout options, such as three-coin multipliers.
These machines were still primitive by today’s standards, with no real features other than multipliers. They were still entirely mechanical, relying on the pulling of a handle and the spinning of reels on a physical screen. When we think about the evolution of slot machines since, these games would be incredibly boring by today’s standards, but they were all the rage back then.
One of the earliest electromechanical slots was called Money Honey and was released by Bally Manufacturing Co. This slot could pay out up to 500 coins, which was revolutionary at the time.
Eventually, the mechanical nature of slots would give way, and the world would slowly come around to…
Video Slots Machines
Believe it or not, reports from the time make it clear that players didn’t initially warm to video slots. They were so used to pulling the handles on machines that tapping buttons and watching digital reels spin on didn’t appeal much.
Yet as satellite and cable TV took their first steps in the ‘70s, the rise of video slots was an inevitable step in the evolution of slot machines, in retrospect. The people back then probably weren’t aware of it, but they were entering the first stages of a digitized world which would come to dominate everything and give rise to slot games they probably couldn’t imagine.
Slowly, video slots took over, and by the 1980s, the first progressive jackpots were available in Las Vegas and elsewhere. This gave rise to the massive jackpots we are used to today, but at the time, the idea of a slot paying out millions was astounding.
By the end of the 20th century, gambling laws in the USA and elsewhere were relaxed, and slot machines spread like wildfire. There were over 200,000 of them in Nevada alone at the turn of the century, and with casinos opening up on Native American reservations and elsewhere, video slots came to represent the largest portion of almost all casino profits.
Yet with the march of evolution being relentless as it is, the physical video slot machine would soon face an existential threat from the next type of slot – the online slot machine. The evolution of slot machines isn’t that different from biological evolution, when you think about it. There’s always a younger competitor ready to take the old versions out!
Online Slot Machines
There were already online casinos in the 1990s, but the internet really began to take off in the early 2000s. Home computing reached a tipping point in the first decade of the new millennium, and as more and more gamblers came online, so too did an increasing number of online casinos and online slot games. Bill Gates probably wasn’t aware of it, but he played a key role in the evolution of slot machines by making computers and hence the internet accessible to everyone.
Starting with software firms like Microgaming and Playtech, online slots soon exploded and evolved at a rapid pace as compared to their predecessors. They started out as three-reel digital fruit machines, but within a decade, there were 3D slots with multiple bonus features such as free spins rounds, bonus wheels, and picking games for instant cash prizes.
There were also huge pooled jackpots up for grabs, adding fuel to the fire and causing more slots players to transition online for a piece of the action. In 2006, for example, Microgaming released Mega Moolah, which is known as a “millionaire maker” because of its multi-million progressive jackpots.
When you consider that it took almost a century for slots to evolve from their early form to the first digital versions, it’s amazing to consider how quickly the evolution of slot machines has unfolded since.
As digital technology progresses, we’re beginning to get a first glimpse into what slots will look like in the years to come.
Virtual Reality Slots
There are generally two camps when it comes to virtual reality – those who believe it is the future of the world and will in fact be better than this world (Mark Zuckerberg being one) and those who believe it will never catch on and is fated to go the way of the mini-disc or the Segway.
While that’s a debate that will be settled with the passage of time, virtual reality slots are already here and have begun to catch on. Sites like Slots Million have won awards for pioneering VR casino experiences, and while they’re still very much in their infancy, they are growing in popularity.
It’s always a risk to make predictions about the future, and that’s outside the scope of this piece on the evolution of slots. However, when it comes to VR, the only limitation is your imagination.
Could we someday experience slot bonus rounds we can go into and move around in? Let’s see. But it sure is fun to think about, and we’re certain that slots in a few decades from now will be totally different than what we’re used to today.
Summary
As you can see, slots don’t stay in a static state for long, and they evolve rapidly as time marches on. That’s as you would expect when billions of dollars are gambled globally every year and game providers fight tooth and nail to win as big a piece of the pie as possible.
Things have certainly changed since Charles August Fey rolled out the Card Bell in the earliest days of slot machines, and the evolution of slot machines won’t grind to a halt here. Since the gambling industry is always at the forefront of whatever technological developments are happening, we’re sure that whatever happens with slots in the future will be an early indicator as to what trends will follow elsewhere around the world.