The Rise of Megaways: How a Sydney Studio's Patent Became an Industry Standard
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 to form a winning combination shifts from spin to spin, topping out at 117,649 when every reel lands its maximum seven symbols, against a ceiling of 4,096 ways on the fixed-format slots that came before it. BTG called the mechanic Megaways, and Dragon Born's own release material states plainly that it was built as the world's first Megaways slot, not an incremental step toward one.
The industry had already moved past a single rigid idea of what a slot's structure had to be before Dragon Born arrived. Microgaming had pioneered a ways-to-win system years earlier, most visibly through titles like Immortal Romance, dropping fixed paylines in favour of a set number of ways a matching combination could land across adjacent reels, 243 ways being the best known figure from a five-reel, three-symbol-high layout. Other studios, among them NetEnt and Play'n GO, built their own games around the same fixed-ways idea in the years that followed. What none of those systems did was let the ways-to-win figure itself move. A 243-ways slot was 243 ways on every spin, printed on the paytable exactly like a fixed-payline game before it, only with a bigger number. Megaways took the concept those games had already normalised and made the number a live variable, different on every spin rather than fixed at the point the game shipped, which is the specific step none of the ways-to-win predecessors had taken.
Bonanza Made It a Mainstream Name
Dragon Born was first, but it was Bonanza, released by BTG later the same year, that became the game most players and most of the industry now associate with Megaways. A mining themed slot with cascading wins layered on top of the variable reel mechanic, meaning winning symbols clear and new ones drop in to potentially chain further wins on the same spin without a fresh spin being needed, Bonanza is widely cited as the title that turned Megaways from one studio's new feature into a mechanic every other provider wanted access to. The distinction matters for anyone tracing the mechanic's actual history: the invention and the breakthrough were two different releases, eight months or so apart, from the same small studio.
Turning a Mechanic Into a Product
What happened next is the part of the story that separates Megaways from most slot innovations, which typically stay locked inside the studio that built them, copied in spirit but never sold outright. BTG patented the underlying mechanic and began licensing it to other providers, meaning a studio with no involvement in building the original engine could pay to use it in their own game, under their own theme, art and maths model, with Megaways as the licensed reel system underneath. Blueprint Gaming was among the first to take up a licence, releasing Genie Jackpots Megaways. Others followed at a pace that outstripped BTG's own release schedule: Pragmatic Play built out a Megaways catalogue including The Dog House Megaways, Great Rhino Megaways and 5 Lions Megaways, Red Tiger Gaming licensed it for titles including Gonzo's Quest Megaways and Piggy Riches Megaways, and further licensees, among them iSoftBet, Fantasma Games and NetEnt, each added their own Megaways-branded titles to their catalogues over the years that followed.
Slot mechanics are notoriously difficult to protect, since a competing studio can typically build something that produces a similar player experience without touching the original code or any patent claim narrow enough to stop them. Megaways broke that pattern specifically because BTG secured patent protection on the mechanic itself, the variable-reel-height, multiplying-ways-to-win system, rather than on any single game built with it. That distinction is why a provider like Pragmatic Play licenses the Megaways engine for specific titles rather than building its own variable-reel slot under a different name from scratch: the underlying mechanic, not only the branding, is the protected asset. For BTG, a small studio that would otherwise be competing for shelf space against providers with far larger release schedules, licensing turned a single mechanic into a recurring revenue stream that scaled with an entire industry's output rather than with its own.
What the Mechanic Actually Changed
Before Megaways, a slot's ways-to-win or payline count was fixed at the point the game shipped, printed on the paytable and unchanging spin to spin. Megaways made that number itself part of the game's variance, shifting from as few as 64 ways on a spin where every reel lands its minimum two symbols up to the 117,649-way ceiling, meaning the visual reel height and the underlying win potential move together in a way a fixed-grid slot never showed. Paired with cascading wins, a feature Megaways titles commonly carry though the mechanic itself doesn't require it, a single spin could chain through several rounds of clearing and refilling symbols before settling, each one drawing from that spin's own reel-height ways count.
That shift changed work that happens well before a player ever sees a reel spin, too. A fixed-ways slot has one paytable, one set of symbol weightings, one number to balance against target RTP and volatility. A Megaways title has to hold that balance across every possible reel-height combination the mechanic can produce on a given spin, since the game's overall RTP is an average across outcomes that can look very different from each other in the short run. That's a meaningfully bigger maths problem than a fixed-ways slot presents, and it's part of why licensing the mechanic outright, rather than attempting to reverse-engineer an equivalent from scratch, made commercial sense for studios that wanted a Megaways title without rebuilding that modelling work independently.
A Mechanic With a Decade of Reach
Megaways is now old enough, as slot mechanics go, that it has outlived several waves of imitators built around different licensed or unlicensed variable-ways systems, and it remains one of the few mechanics in the industry's history that spread through formal licensing rather than through studios independently converging on a similar idea. Dragon Born's own release announcement, dated January 2016, is a specific enough starting point that the mechanic's origin isn't really in dispute the way some slot history is. What's less settled, and probably always will be, is how much of Megaways' staying power belongs to the mechanic itself, and how much belongs to Bonanza having been good enough, eight months later, to make the rest of the industry want in.
Dragon Born: Specification
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Developer | Big Time Gaming |
| Released | January 2016 |
| Reels | 6, variable height (2 to 7 symbols per reel) |
| Maximum ways to win | 117,649 |
| Previous industry ceiling | 4,096 ways |
| Initial distribution | NYX OGS (January), Microgaming and Openbet partners (April) |
| Status | First commercially released Megaways title |
Responsible Gambling
This is a history of a slot mechanic, not a recommendation to play. A bigger or variable ways count changes how wins are calculated, not the odds of winning or the long-run return. Anyone offering these games to UK players should hold a UK Gambling Commission licence, GAMSTOP offers free self-exclusion across every licensed UK operator, and BeGambleAware provides free, confidential support.