GameCrafters

In 1997 Nokia shipped the 6110 with a game called Snake preloaded, and a generation learned one rule by heart: the snake grows each time it eats, and the game ends the moment it runs into its own body. Relax Gaming's Snake Arena takes that rule and builds a slot's free spins round around it. The result is a bonus that ends not when a counter runs out, but when its own success boxes it in. That is an unusual thing for a slot designer to choose, and it is worth looking at why it works and what it costs. Borrowing a rule, not a theme Plenty of slots borrow imagery from older games. Pixel art, chiptune sound and arcade cabinets are a well worn visual shorthand. Snake Arena does something different. It wraps the snake in a medieval setting, with a knight as its quarry, so the look is not the phone game at all. What it borrows is the rule set. On the base game the grid is a 5x5 layout with 30 fixed paylines, and both the Snake and the Knight act as Wild symbols. The snake sits a...

Somewhere in Microgaming's design of Mega Moolah, a number was settled on: 88.12%. It is the figure the game publishes as its return to player, and it sits far outside the band where most modern video slots live. Across the catalogue of slots I track, published RTPs cluster between roughly 94% and 97%. Mega Moolah is not a rounding error below that range. It is a deliberate design, and the reason is visible the moment the game's structure is laid out: this is a slot built to carry a jackpot, and almost everything else in it is scaffolding. A base game that was never meant to be the point Look at what Mega Moolah offers when the jackpot is set aside. A 5x3 grid, 25 paylines, African wildlife and playing card symbols. Three or more monkey Scatter symbols trigger 15 free spins, with every win in that round multiplied. The volatility is rated Medium. That is a conventional, almost plain, slot of its kind. Its published specification lists no cascading reels, no expanding grid a...

In January 2016, a slot called Dragon Born went live on Leo Vegas, distributed through the NYX OGS platform, with a wider rollout to Microgaming and Openbet partners scheduled for April. It looked, at a glance, like another fantasy-themed reel game. What it actually carried was a new reel mechanic from a small Sydney studio, one that would eventually appear on titles from more than a dozen other providers who had nothing to do with building it. A Studio Founded on One Idea Big Time Gaming was founded in 2011 by Nik Robinson, out of a small office in Surry Hills, Sydney. For its first several years it built conventional slots, the standard fixed-reel, fixed-payline format the whole industry used. Dragon Born was different by design: rather than a set grid of reels each showing a fixed number of symbols, its six reels could each independently land anywhere from two to seven symbols tall on a given spin. Multiply the possible symbol counts across all six reels, and the number of ways t...

In November 2012, a Swedish studio that had spent sixteen years building slots mostly seen by players who never learned its name released a five reel game with ten paylines and no bonus round to speak of. Starburst had a gem theme, a wild that expanded and re-spun, and wins that paid in both directions across the reels. Nobody at NetEnt was calling it a landmark at the time. It was one release among many that year. A decade and more later, it is still on the front page of casino lobbies that were not even built when it launched, and the studio that made it no longer exists as an independent company at all. A Slot Studio That Started as Someone Else's Division NetEnt did not begin as a startup chasing a slot idea. It began in 1996 as a division of Cherry AB, an established Swedish gaming and entertainment company with roots in land based machines and casino operations going back decades further. Building online casino software for an existing gambling company gave the new divisio...