The History of Online Slots

It’s common knowledge that online slots are the cornerstone of most gaming sites. They are attractive to everyone with their big wins, fun and varied designs and accessibility. This great gaming trend must have started somewhere but where and when?

Real Life Slots

Slot machines, or ‘one armed bandits’ are of course ubiquitous in casinos across the world and rightfully so but it hasn’t always been this way. The first betting machine was invented by a company called Sittman and Pitt from Brooklyn, New York. This invention gained popularity fast and was soon being installed in hundreds of pubs and clubs around the greater New York area. The machine was based on poker hands and had no direct cash prizes or jackpots. Instead, if a player got a winning poker hand the machine would reward him/her with a free drink or cigars depending on what the proprietor had on offer. Bar owners soon found a way to manipulate these machines however and so a new solution had to be hatched up.

A man by the name of Charles Fey from San Francisco, California came up with the idea of a much simpler game with only three spinning reels and five different symbols instead of the fifty that the Sittman and Pitt machine had. Some of the symbols that Fey decided to use in the late 1800’s are still popular staples of the slot machine today, they are; The Horseshoe, The Diamond, Spades, Hearts, and the Liberty Bell.

Since then the slot machine has swept through the casino scene like nothing else and has continued to be innovated upon and reinvented. In 1976 the first ‘Video Slot Machine’ was invented and after a trial run in the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel before getting the go-ahead from the Las Vegas Gaming Commission to be rolled out on the Las Vegas Strip.

Online Slots

As with so many other classic games such as Poker and Bingo slot machines have made a huge splash in the world of internet gaming. Their popularity has soared in recent years in a way that is somewhat of an obvious parallel to their original meteoric rise at the beginning of the last century. The internet has allowed games companies to innovate in ways that would have been unfathomable to the early slot player such as cool and interesting themes, bonus games, win multipliers, credit currencies and other such additions.

The online gaming craze has changed the face of the internet, an enormous increase from 15 gaming sites in 1996 to 200 sites in 1997 just goes to show how popular they actually are. Since then there has been a move away from downloadable programme slot games and a greater focus on browser-based gaming, this is due to the development of better browsers and plugins such as Java and has helped the popularity of online slots massively by making them easier to access and play!

As to what the future holds for online slots, your guess is as good as mine. A safe bet, however, is that these companies will continue to expand their online slot selections and add new and exciting themes, games and prizes. The core of the game will no doubt stay the same so you can expect to be getting instant wins and ginormous jackpots far into the future!

Do some further reading on the development of online slots!