The slots games are currently among the most popular casino games. Basically no casino would ever be complete without the slots. The online casinos reached a whole new level in slots, many of them offering literally dozens of different slot games.
The slots history starts only about a century ago in California. In 1895 Charles Fey created the first slot machine consisting in three spinning reels with only five symbols: diamonds, spades, hearts, horseshoes and a Liberty Bell. The slot machine was named “Liberty Bell”, this being the top symbol. This was just the beginning of the slot mania that conquered the whole world.
The traditional slots operated with coins and the spin was made by pulling a lever situated on the right side of the machine. The newest slots machine are operated with prepaid casino cards and the lever is replaced with a push button.
Casinos faced a big question: how to offer a bigger jackpot to players keeping an old look of 3 reels and 20 symbols? The solution came with computerized machines. Microprocessor program performs all functions of a computerized slot machine including spinning the reels by sending signals to stepper motors. The part of the program called RNG – Random Number Generator – chooses 3 numbers at random from a huge range of numbers (4 billions or so). Every number corresponds to a specific symbol. In result, 3 symbol combination is chosen by a program even before the reels stop spinning instead of being a result of the reels coming to a stop of their rotational movement. Thus, a machine can still show 20 physical symbols marking 20 stop positions on a reel, but in reality it can have 64 or more “virtual” computer-determined stops on every reel due, simply put, to the fact that every symbol out of 20 on a reel can represent many different numbers chosen by RNG. This way it became possible to offer new huge jackpots to players on traditionally looking machines of electromechanical era. Attractiveness of slots made a qualitative jump. Now, we are in a new era of slots that look like www.888.com/online-casino, but actually are computers in disguise.
However the most effective factor has been the introduction of bonus games. These offer payouts in many interesting ways. There are two types of bonus games commonly found in online slots. One type is the free spin bonus games. A particular combination of symbols awards a number of free spins in which the payouts are usually multiplied. However the more interesting bonus round is the bonus round on the second screen. This eliminates the boredom of the spinning reels by creating a game in another environment related to the theme. The most common of the games is to pick ‘x’ objects out of ‘y’ objects. The objects chosen reveal extra credits. Some of the bonus games are multi-stage. Players have to win one game in order to play the next one .