If you’re going to compare the modern video slot game online with a retro slot machine, there are many factors to take into consideration. Although they’re just divergent versions of the same thing, video slot games are still very different to the retro machines so often found in pubs – play Centurion online slot.
Does it simply come down to traditionalism against modernism, nostalgia against evolution, or are there bigger nuances involved when comparing the two?
How did the two get separated anyway?
If we go back to the early 1990s, it wouldn’t even have been a debate. Pre-internet, people happily played on slots machines as their forebearers had done for pretty much 100 years.
Then the internet happened, and someone came up with the good idea of making slots games available on the world wide web. As technology advanced, fans of slots games could enjoy better graphics, more lucrative prizes and increased innovation, all from the comfort of their own homes.
In all honesty, traditional slot machines could well have been sliding towards going obsolete before the internet came along, but thanks to their transition online, the video slot games of today are sophisticated, enticing, and potentially lucrative.
Main differences between online slots and retro slots
There’s an argument that as online slot games evolved and became more sophisticated in design, they also became harder to beat.
After all, online slot game designers invest a lot of money into developing their games. That means that a lot of revenue has to be recouped somehow.
Whether this is true, however, is fairly contentious. The UK Gambling Commission ensures that every single online slot site for whom they provide official licences use an RNG (random number generator). In layman’s terms, it means that you get a fair chance of winning a prize every time you spin the reels.
But when you consider how basic retro slot machines were, maybe the argument does stand up. Modern video slots could be tougher to beat but simply because the retro versions had fewer symbols with fewer possible combinations to them. Fewer combinations mean that your odds of winning go up!
Another humorous aspect to retro slots was the ability to cheat on them. Determined gamblers have tried old methods like fake coins, and even coins tied to pieces of elastic just to try and affect the way the reels spun.
Clearly, those methods of cheating are long consigned to the wheelie bin of history.
Play whenever you want, wherever you are
Probably the biggest difference between video slots online and retro slots is how they’re poles apart on the spectrum of accessibility.
It’s difficult for millennials to imagine, but pre laptops and mobile devices, people actually had to go places to do stuff. That meant travelling to your local pub or in-house casino to play slots machines.
Even in the rain. Even in the cold. It boggles the mind. Nowadays, playing online is easy. Play in the bath, in bed, at the bookstore, at the bus-stop – the choice is yours.
After all, it’s the choice that separates the two more than anything else. Just by searching Google for “online casino”, there are literally hundreds of different options, and within those casinos, there are hundreds of different titles to pick and play.
Multiply all those hundreds of options together, and you’ve got a whole digital world against which retro slots just cannot compete.
