September 2009
Hail To The Liberty Bell by John Grochowski
Hail to the Liberty Bell. Let jackpots
ring. We’re not talking Philadelphia and bigger issues of
independence and liberty, of course. We’re talking slot machines,
one-armed bandits, spinning reels and big paydays. We’re talking
Charles Fey. Charles Fey was the father of the modern slot machine,
the man who gave the one-armed bandits their arms and started the
world spinning as easy as reel No. 1, reel No. 2 and reel No. 3.
Oh, there were coin-operated gambling devices before Fey. There were
“color wheel” machines, for starters, games with a single vertical
wheel up front, divided into color spaces. You could take a flutter
on which color the wheel would stop. But it was with the Liberty Bell
that modern slot machines really begin. It was in 1895 that Fey, a
San Francisco auto mechanic, devised the machine with three spinning
reels, a clockwork assembly of gears, clutches and pulleys, and a
handle to start it all in motion. The reels contained heart, diamond,
spade and horseshoe symbols, along with one Liberty Bell on each
reel. Line up the three Bells, and your single-nickel wager would
bring you 10 nickels in return (later Bells offered higher payouts) —
a princely jackpot of 50 cents. Or it would pay you 10 of something —
the sign on the game says three Bells pay “10 units.”
Early slot machines were placed in bars and some retail
outlets, not always legally. They’d be touted as trade stimulators
rather than gambling devices, something to amuse the customers and
bring extra business. Those 10-unit jackpots might be free drinks,
sticks of gum or golf balls — unless the merchant was making cash
jackpots under the table, away from the prying eyes of the law.
Fey would live to see the legalization of casinos. Nevada made
the move in 1931, while Fey passed away in 1944, at age 83. But Fey
would not live to see slot machines become as overwhelmingly popular
as they are today. In the early days of casinos — in fact, until
technology started to bring bigger jackpots and more bells and
whistles to the games decades later — slot machines were a small
piece of the casino business. They were there as a diversion, a
little break from the serious gambling going on at the craps,
blackjack and roulette tables.
But let’s pretend Fey could see what was to come. If we could time
travel, pick up Fey and whisk him into the future, what key changes
would he see as slot machines were on their way to becoming the
people’s choice among casino games?
First stop, 1964. Slot machine jackpots had already come a long way
from the 10 nickels the Liberty Bell could pay for a one-nickel bet.
But there were constraints. In the early days, manufacturers
including Mills Novelty Company of Chicago built on Fey’s innovation,
including internal coin tubes so the games could pay larger amounts
automatically without an attendant having to make the payoff. But
tubes have tight limitations on the number of coins that will fit.
What we regard today as a moderate hit of a few dozen coins would
drain tubes fast. Anything much larger would have to be paid by hand.
Whether the problem was refilling coin tubes or paying jackpots by
hand, it was all labor intensive, and expensive in time and money for
the casino.
That changed dramatically in 1964. If Charles Fey could take a walk
with us down a casino aisle, he’d be amazed to see the Money Honey
slot machine by Bally Gaming. Oh, it was definitely a descendent of
his original creation, with three reels, winning symbols and an arm
at the side, but this one paid more than 10 coins at a time. Money
Honey could pay out a whopping 500 coins at a time, and there were
plenty of combinations that would have drained earlier games — 150
coins for either three watermelons or three bars, 100 for three
stars, and had 27 combinations of three cartoon-like faces that would
pay 18 coins each.
How could the machine pay out all that? The key was the coin hopper,
developed by engineers Frank Nicolaus and Bud Breitenstein. The motor-
driven hopper gave slot machines a large pool of coins rather than
the limited tubes. That enabled larger, more frequent payoffs. It
also allowed larger bets. On Money Honey, players could wager one,
two or three coins at a time, a big move from the single-nickel
Liberty Bell.
Fey would be equally amazed if he could open the machine and peek
inside. In the place of most of his gears, springs and pulleys were
servo-relays and electrical components. Money Honey was the first of
the electro-mechanical slots, the first slot machine that plugged in,
enabling lights and sounds. The Liberty Bell went where no game-maker
had gone before, but it couldn’t play a celebratory tune when it paid
off its nickels. Now games could.
With Fey properly intrigued, we could leave 1964 and take him
another 15 years into the future for a look at a project Inge Telnaus
was developing at Bally, one that took slot machines another quantum
leap ahead.
To bring truly large jackpots to slot machines — not the 10 coins of
the Liberty Bell nor the 500 on Money Honey, but the millions of
dollars we see on some progressive games today — something had to be
done to change the odds of the game. From Fey’s creation on through
the 1970s, the only way manufacturers had to change the odds was to
either make the reels bigger with more stops, or to add more reels.
Early games had 10 symbols on each of three reels. If there was one
top jackpot symbol per reel, the odds of winning the big one were 1
in 10x10x10, or 1 in 1,000. Expand the reels to 20 symbols each, and
the odds grew to 1 in 8,000. Make it a four-reel game with 20 symbols
per reel, and it was 1 in 160,000. A game could pay some nice money
at that point, but accounting for other, smaller payoffs during the
course of play and a little something for the house, jackpots still
couldn’t be of the lifestyle-changing variety.
It took computerized slots to change that, and the random number
generator. Telnaes devised a system for mapping slot symbols onto a
virtual reel, making the physical reel behave as if it has more
symbols than it really does.
To simplify a bit, let’s say I have a 20-stop physical reel with one
7, two triple bars, three double bars, four single bars and 10 blank
spaces. And let’s say I want it to behave as if it has 64 stops
instead, with one of them being the 7, four of them being triple bars
and so on. I have the programmer tell the game’s program that
whenever No. 1 comes up, to have the 7 stop on the payline. Whenever
No. 2 or No. 3 come up, have the first triple bar stop on the
payline. Whenever No. 4 or No. 5 is generated, show the second triple
bar. And I keep assigning numbers until I reach my target of 64. If
you can take that reel with 20 symbols or blanks and make it behave
as if it has 64 stops instead, there are 262,144 possible
combinations. With that, you can start paying some sizeable jackpots.
If you want potential payoffs of really big bucks, you can make the
virtual reel bigger without increasing the size of the physical reel.
With 256 virtual symbols or spaces, there are nearly 17 million three-
reel combinations — 16,777,216 to be exact. If only one symbol on
each reel is the top jackpot award, the casino can start paying
lifestyle-changing prizes.
With Fey’s mind no doubt boggled by the notion, let’s take him just
a few more years into the future for one more step that had to happen
to turn modest-paying slot machines into three-reel jackpot
factories. It wasn’t enough to just map out the virtual reel. There
had to be a mechanism to put it into effect, to make sure the reels
stop where the RNG tells them to. That came in 1984 when Gary Harris
and Randy Adams of Universal Co. patented the computerized stepper
motor. Reel spinning slots, whether they have three reels or the
popular new five-reel configuration, are still called “stepper slots”
within the casino industry today. Along the way, International Game
Technology would acquire the Telnaes and stepper patents, helping
along its modern-day dominance among reel-spinning slots. From the
outside, the most popular, durable games of the last couple of
decades — Double Diamond, Red White and Blue, Wild Cherry — remain
easily familiar as children of the Liberty Bell. But random number
generators, virtual reels and computerized stepper motors make then a
different generation indeed.
From here on out, the innovations come fast and furious. From 1984
we need jump Fey forward in time only two more years, to 1986, to see
Megabucks, the first of the wide-area progressive jackpot systems. In
Fey’s day, when 50 cents was a windfall, he never got to see
progressive slots, with a percentage of each bet added to the
jackpot. And he certainly never saw anything like Megabucks, the
first of the wide-area progressives. Wide-areas link jackpots in
multiple casinos, so that a percentage of a wager made in Casino A
will raise the jackpot also available in Casinos B, C, D and E.
Jackpots in the millions of dollars would have astounded Fey. So
would the technology to electronically link the casinos so that the
jackpot increase instantly was displayed in all.
The innovations come fast and furious in the computer age. In the
late 1980s, we’d be able to show Fey the conversion to credit play,
with credits mounting on a meter instead of coins dropping out of the
machine on each win. And a few years later, in the ‘90s, he’d note
the addition of bill validators, so players could slide currency into
machines and get credits to play against instead of dropping coins
into a machine to start play.
Together, those two innovations made a huge difference in the way we
played. Going decades beyond the Liberty Bell, in Fey’s lifetime the
most sophisticated slot machines required players to drop a coin in
for each play, then would pay on each winner. By the late 1980s, that
had changed a bit. You still had to drop coins for your first plays,
but winnings would mount on the credit meter, and as long as there
were credits on the meter, you could play them instead of dropping
more coins. When slot manufacturers started adding bill validators to
machines in the 1990s, that took us another leap forward, to starting
with credits on the meter, and seeing coins only when we hit a button
to cash out.
If we jumped ahead to modern times, we could show Fey the logical
extension of this: slot machines without coin slots. Games where
players never use coins at all. From the first experiments with
ticket printers — and the objection from players who had been used to
coins used in slots all the way back to the Liberty Bell — we’ve
reached a modern day where nearly all games use ticket in, ticket out
payoffs. Push the button for a payoff, and you don’t get coins
clanking and clattering into a metal tray. You get a bar-coded ticket
that you can then redeem for cash. That would be a new one on Fey.
But we don’t want the great innovator to miss what was going on with
the fun parts of the games, the ones that enhance our entertainment
experience. So we take him to 1996, where Anchor Gaming’s Wheel of
Gold was causing a commotion. Remember Randy Adams, one of the
driving forces behind the stepper motor when we visited 1984? By
1996, he was at Anchor, and Anchor was pushing the first bonus wheel.
The Wheel of Gold mounted a column at the back of a standard Bally
slant-top slot machine, with a vertical wheel atop the column. The
wheel was segmented into bonus amounts, and when the special wheel
symbol landed on the payline, a tone would sound. The player would
press a button to start the wheel spinning. When it stopped, the
player would get the number of bonus credits at the top of the wheel.
It was a sensation. When the tone sounded, players all around would
stop their own games and watch the wheel. It certainly caught IGT’s
attention — no doubt it would have caught Fey’s attention, too. The
world’s largest slotmaker licensed the system, and later bought
Anchor. In IGT’s hands, Wheel of Gold morphed into Wheel of Fortune.
No doubt you’ve seen that one.
Jumping one more year to 1997, we could show Fey Reel ’Em In! and
the beginning of America’s video slot revolution. WMS Gaming wasn’t
the first company to market multiline video slots with bonus events.
Such games were already established in Australia, where Aristocrat
Leisure was in the forefront. But Reel ’Em In! was fresh and new in
the United States. Fey passed on before television reached mass
penetration, so he’d probably be fascinated by the video images of
reels. But no doubt he’d recognize the images of spinning reels as
the Liberty Bell brought to modern times.
From the beginnings of video slots to current day, the tinkering and
fine-tuning happens year by year, day by day. We could point Fey
toward mystery jackpots and multilevel jackpots, with Aristocrat
leading the way with its Hyperlink products such as Cash Express.
Every manufacturer has a version of these nowadays, with progressives
with names such as Mini, Minor, Major and Grand giving you a chance
to win a few bucks or a few thousand.
Fey probably would look in wonder at community-style games such as
WMS’ Monopoly Big Event, players sharing bonus rounds and making
playing the slots a social experience.
And the big innovation for the very near future, server-based
gaming, might just be mind-boggling for a man born in the 19th
century. The ability to instantly change game themes, to deliver
bonus rewards and comps and for real-time two-way communication
between player and casino would be totally outside Fey’s experience.
But when he stepped back and saw the reels spinning, both on stepper
slots and on video screens, Charles Fey might well nod and smile. For
all the changes, for all the computerization and bonus rounds and
progressive jackpots and ticket payoffs, the games people play are
the great, great, great grandchildren of his Liberty Bell.
— John Grochowski is the author of The Casino Answer Book, The Slot
Machine Answer Book, The Video Poker Answer Book and the Craps Answer
Book, available through Bonus Books, Inc. at (800) 225-3775.
