It’s amazing to see how technology has changed the world around us. In the early 20th century, a phone was a distinctive candlestick model. Electricity was very scarce back then, and cars were built using what now resembles bicycle tires.
The technology of pokies has advanced just as rapidly, taking poker from mechanical devices to filling the spaces of land-based gambling venues, and eventually right into our homes.
Today, you can find a wide variety of online pokies that have various exciting features and offer the best payouts. Also, pokies with no deposit bonus offer a generous bonus amount and can help you in optimizing your payouts.
In this article, let’s take a look at the progression of pokies technology.
Early pokies technology
In 1895, San-Francisco based mechanic Charles Fey introduced the world to the first-ever poker machine – or slot machine as they call them in the US. The machine had a large metal casing, a small coin hopper, and few-gear driven drums that spun around the wheel. When the user pulled the lever, the drum spun around and revealed three symbols painted out on the reels. This machine represented the practical pokies technology, as it was automatically able to pay out the prize to the winner.
Addition of more reels and symbols
In order to offer high jackpot prizes, some manufacturers started installing additional symbols on the reels. The original machine with 3 reels and 10 symbols per reel had only 1,000 possible combinations. The number of symbols on each reel eventually rose to 22 and the combinations increased to 10,000.
Electromechanical technology in pokies
With more and more gambling venues popping up, poker machine manufacturers wanted to design the machines to work independently. In 1963, Bally’s introduced electromechanical pokies which featured ‘bottomless’ hoppers and were able to pay up to 500 coins automatically.
Eventually, manufacturers started using microprocessors to control reels which gave them all the control they needed. These microprocessors allowed the games to essentially monitor themselves – delivering higher payouts when the hopper was full and lower payouts when it was near empty.
The advent of video pokies
Dale Electronics introduced the world’s first video poker machine in 1970. It was called “Poker- Matic”. The machine was installed in virtually every casino in Las Vegas at that time. Even though Poker-Matic didn’t become a hit, it laid the groundwork for future games that would capture the attention of millions of players.
RNG and Ticket in/Ticket-out systems
The introduction of the Random Number Generator (RNG), combined with Ticket in/Ticket-out systems, changed the pokies technology entirely. The use of RNG made the probability of a player winning on any given spin entirely unpredictable. And as the RNG is truly random, it could pay the jackpot multiple times in a week, or only once in a few years.
The use of the ticketing system gave casinos even more flexibility. Instead of having machines payout actual coins, they produced a ticket that players could exchange for money at the cashier.