Video Slot Machines vs. Mechanical Reels

By John Grochowski on Wednesday March 17, 2010

gaming, slot-machines

Video slot machines have been the fastest-growing segment of the casino industry for more than a decade now. Games with new bells and whistles, bonus events, free spins, community play, even 3-D imaging are introduced all the time.

It seems almost funny looking back on the first time I saw a slot machine with video reels. It was a crowded Saturday night, and I looked down a row of slot machines that was just packed with players, except for what appeared to be one empty game in the middle of the row. With a few bumps and a few “pardon me’s,” I made my way to the game, and found the reason it was empty. It was the lone video game in a row full of machines with mechanical reels.

Players didn’t trust the primitive early video slots, which had weak graphics and attempted to mimic three-reel play with none of the bonus fun designed into today’s games.

Now there are plenty of players ready to play the video games, but every now and then I’ll still get an e-mail or a call from a player who just doesn’t trust them. “They’re computers,” is the common lament, “and computers can be programmed to do anything.”

Guess what? Games with mechanical reels are computerized, too. What you see on the reels is just what the game’s random number generator tells the game to display, just as what you see on the screen of a video screen is what the RNG tells the game to display there. The games are heavily regulated, and must go through gaming labs to have their randomness verified.

Yes, video slots are computer games. But so are reel-spinning slots, and we have gaming labs and regulators to keep them honest.