History of Slots
The very popular game of slots makes one curious as to how it started for the very first time. It has a century old history that dates back to 1887, when in a small town of California an American mechanic invented this game for the very first time. His name was Charles Fey and the slot designed by Fey had three reels with five symbols on each of these including the spade, heart, horseshoes, diamonds and a Liberty Bell. This machine came to be known as the Liberty bell as this symbol gave the highest payout.
The Liberty Bell became so famous that even after gambling games being banned in California, Fey could not satisfy the demand from rest of the country.
As is the case with all discoveries and inventions, they cannot be kept as a secret for long, and so the game of slots became so famous that many people tried to make their own slots. Such was the case with Sittman and Pitt of New York, who in 1891 developed a slot with five reels and used poker combinations to give the payouts.
In 1963, Bally manufacturers developed a slot machine that was fully electromechanical and operated without the help of an attendant. This machine came to be known as Money Honey.
In 1976, the ordinary slots got modified into video slots which became very famous after being further modified to be more cheat-proof. These slots gained popularity in the casinos of Las Vegas and are still found there.
Further improvements in technology made slot machines available with many more play lines and those with one or two were replaced by slots having 9 to 50 play lines. In many modern day slots, play lines have been totally abandoned by the introduction of more than 243 ways to win.
These days, slots are the major part of the casinos and most of the revenue is generated because of these machines. The physical space they used to occupy has been replaced by the moving of slot games online which has also resulted in an increase in the number of games with many different themes, features and coin sizes.
Another trend in slots that makes players stick to the game is that many movie based slots are available. The software developers face tough competition to develop games that not only depicts a graphically rich movie based theme but also to keep things interesting and lucrative at the same time.