Slots is by far the most popular casino game today. People come to casinos just to play slots. At one time slots were kept in casinos to enable the women to entertain themselves, while their men engaged in more 'serious' wagering games.
The Origin of Slots
The slot machine is over a hundred years old. Charles Fey invented the first machine in California in 1887. His machine had only three reels and five symbols - horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts and the famous Liberty Bell. This first slot machine was named Liberty Bell because the largest payout was on three Liberty Bells. The slot machine was known as the one-armed bandit for two reasons. The single lever that operated the machine looked like an arm. And because it took your money away it was called a bandit.
The Bell Fruit Gum Company devised another of the early slots. Their machines gave out fruit flavoured chewing gums as prizes. The symbols used were the fruits used in the chewing gum flavours, for example the cherry and the melon. The fruit symbols survived long after the practice of dispensing chewing gums was done away with.
Electromechanical Slots
The version of the slots that are currently seen in casinos came into existence in 1964. It was the product of Bally Manufacturing and was named Money Honey. The main difference in these slots was that springs were replaced by electronic components. Hence this machine was also called electromechanical slots. Some of the other features popular today were also first added in the Money Honey. These include sound and light effects, facilities to bet multiple coins and a hopper for collecting the coins won.
Video Slots
In 1975 Walt Fraley invented the first electronic slots that could be played on a video screen. Therefore it came to be known as video slots. Fraley named his slot machine Fortune Coin. The spinning reels that produced the random combination were replaced by a random number generator. It was for this reason that there was initial resistance to video slots because players were not comfortable with a mechanism they could not see. But International Gaming Technology stepped in and promoted the game in a big way. Today video slots have brought about great changes in the game. The number of reels and lines has increased manifold. The special effects have also become much better.
