History of Slots
Charles Fey was a mechanic from a small town in California who became the inventor of the first ever slot machine. In 1887, he developed a slot machine that had three reels and five symbols on each. The symbols were spades, diamonds, hearts, horseshoes and the Liberty Bell, the last being the symbol with the highest payout, thus the name Liberty Bell was given to the slot.
Although gambling soon got banned in Fey’s home state, he still kept receiving immense demands for the Liberty Bell from elsewhere in America.
A fifty card slot machine was developed by Sittman and Pitt from New York in 1891 as a modification to Fey’s Liberty Bell. It had variety of poker combinations which yielded payouts for players. This is taken as a foundation for slots that came on later.
The next modification in the slot machines came in 1963 when the ‘Money-Honey’ machine came to the slot industry. It was developed by Bally manufacturers and was the first completely electromechanical slot machine which could give payouts of around 500 coins without human help.
The slot machines underwent more and more modifications to make them free of cheating, and thus video slots were introduced which gained popularity almost immediately. They appeared in the casinos of Las Vegas and are famous to this day.
The number of paylines in slot machines was also increased with time as technology improved, with the number being increased from 9 to over 50. But today, many slot machines have left the idea of paylines altogether, rather they have more than 243 way of winning.
Of all the games in a casino, slot machines account for most of the allocated space and account for most of the revenue earned by the casino, proving that they are the most popular game on the floor. More and more themes, features and bonus games are being introduced in slot machines as they move online, leading to increased attraction of the players to the interesting and lucrative game, besides eliminating the issue of space as well.
Software developers are expected to increase the graphic richness of movie-based themes in slot machines, as well as the bonuses for each game.