As a poker player, you may be surprised to hear that I also love slot machines. Or maybe not. Anyway, I just love the whole iconic gambling life, and slots are a fixture of casino gaming. Whether you play at an online casino USA or elsewhere, you can count on slots being a big part of the experience.
Back in the day, all I really had was the typical one-armed bandit; three reels and one payline behind a little glass window, with real mechanical reels inside and a big old brass handle on the right side to make everything go. Slots and fruit machines like this have been around since the late 1800s, and didn’t really change much for the next six or seven decades!
When computers started to come into the scene, the big heavy expensive parts of the slot machine were replaced first, and then new features began to be included. You started to see five reels, and multiple paylines, and sometimes even some nice-looking graphics to spice things up. That’s pretty much what you’ll see in Las Vegas or Atlantic City (or any number of more regional casinos) today…and you could be forgiven for thinking that slot evolution stopped there, some time in the 1980s.
I certainly wasn’t prepared for the universe of online slots when I first encountered the online gambling scene. The sophisticated software makes all sorts of features possible that would be difficult or impossible to implement in a ‘brick-and-mortar’ casino setting — we’re talking about extra bonus rounds and other great animated features, as well as all of the other details that make gambling online such an improved experience over the land-based kind.
Most impressive are the progressive jackpots, which are no longer limited to a small network of individual slots but cover the globe. Whereas progressive fans in land-based casinos get crazy over a jackpot that tops a million every few years, progressive online slots pay out six-figure jackpots pretty much every week…and the seven-figure jackpots hit every few months!