No matter which casino you go to, there’s always a percentage of the slot machines on the casino floor that have that classic design. Three reels (on occasion five), physical ones (not a computer screen pretending to be them), usually with bars and 7s on the reels along with some other symbols.
This classic format has endured for decades, and even now casinos continue to put new variations of them on their floors. And there’s a name for this type of machine: Stepper, or Mechanical Reels.
While they look quite different on the surface, under the hood they work pretty similar to the video reels slots that are out there today. Their outcome is determined by the Random Number Generator (RNG), and although they physically have a limited number of reel spaces because reels can only be so big, in reality their reels are weighted, meaning some reel stops are more likely to come up than others.
The totality of the reel, dubbed a virtual reel, is much longer. And as you would expect, reel stops with blank spaces or lower paying symbols are more likely to come up than those with the best symbols or wilds. The reason for this is simple – by making the best payouts more rare, they can offer bigger top prizes.
Of course, this also allows for a lot more teasing to happen. Physical reels, being as they are, allow players to see what was just above or below the payline(s) that they play for, and because the blank spaces above/below are more likely to come out, they can tease players a lot more than the way many video reel slots are designed nowadays.
While the most traditional arrangement of steppers was a single line earlier on, the addition of more pay lines certainly occurred with steppers as well. 5 and 9 line games are pretty commonplace nowadays; Everi has released a slew of 9-line stepper games over the years, and IGT’s new wave of stepper games has re-envisioned classics like Double Top Dollar with a higher line count.
As such, players now have more choice than ever, even in terms of variations of their favorite games. While they will never be as over the top visually as video reels can be, they have an enduring spot on the casino floor.
Did you know that early mechanical reels used to be mechanically spun and stop naturally and the code was then read by the internal electronics to decide whether a payout was due? This was then changed because people were drilling holes in the machine sides and inserting a rod to lock the reels in a winning position and emptying the machine of coins. The later way was for the machine to generate the random number and stop the mechanical reels in the determined position as in use today. In the earlier versions there were 36 symbols per reel of which only 1 was a jackpot symbol so the chances of getting a jackpot was 36 x 36 x 36 = 46656 to 1
Hey Phil – the ingenuity of people trying to beat the machines has led to a lot of changes over the years, but it is true that the random number generator is a more recent development, and why reel alignment is less important now than what the RNG actually determined was the outcome (and why we seem some of these occasional refusals to pay due to malfunction). Slots have a pretty colorful history!