Tuesday, 22 October 2024

Two Plums and a Bell...

 

Adam Faith manhandles a knocked-off 'one armed bandit' in Budgie, 1971

If you think the title of this post sounds a bit rude, you clearly don’t remember the iconic era of mechanical fruit machines, otherwise known as one-armed bandits, that were once to be found in pubs, clubs and arcades not just in Britain but, as Nicholas Parsons used to say, ‘around the world.’ They’re long gone, of course, replaced by modern, electronic versions replete with features including ‘nudge’, ‘hold’ and a baffling array of other options.

‘Play our fruit machines’ said a notice on the display screen in a local pub. The machines in question were, of course, electronic, and the example I could see in a nearby alcove didn’t even have any of the ‘classic’ fruit iconography. This set me thinking: where and how did it all get started? The idea of a gambling machine that pays out on a range of pre-determined combinations is simple enough, but why choose fruit for the winning lines and who made that decision? I decided to look into it in as much depth as the internet will allow…

First thing I learned is that the term ‘fruit machine’ is specifically British. Elsewhere, such devices are known by the more prosaic name of ‘slot machines.’ Everyone who has ever played or merely watched another player pumping their small change into one of them will be familiar with the fruity iconography employed on the spinning drums: an orange, a lemon, a couple of cherries, a plum, and a watermelon (always sliced so as to display its red interior). In addition, there were a range of other symbols including a bell, and a graphic that simply had the word ‘BAR’ inside a black rectangle. To earn a payout, the spinning drums had to stop at a matching line of three identical icons, or various pre-set combinations, eg two bells and a ‘bar’, in orientations specified by the machine’s mechanics (or, latterly, electronics).

The first such machines, built by the Sittman and Pitt company of Brooklyn, New York, were much more overt about their gambling origins, and featured spinning drums decorated not with fruit, but with 50 different playing card faces across five drums. The machines were in essence a form of mechanised poker, with a ‘winning hand’ paying out not in cash but credits for beer, cigarettes and so on. The odds were improved in favour of the ‘house’ by removing two cards from the full deck, and the drums in the machine could also be rearranged to reduce the likelihood of a winning line. 

Sittman and Pitt’s machine appeared in 1891, but around the same time, Charles Fey of San Francisco had come up with a simpler, three-drum system, with symbols of horseshoes, diamonds, hearts and a Liberty Bell, the latter giving its name to the machine and explaining why the image of a golden bell continued to feature on slot machines for decades to come. Unlike the poker-based machine, Fey’s were able to pay out in nickel increments, up to a maximum of 50 cents, for which the player had to score three Liberty Bells in a row. The machines became hugely popular very quickly, and other manufacturers also adopted the Liberty Bell image. 

So where did the fruit come in? In fact, the explanation is both simple, and logical. An early variant of the machine payed out in fruit-flavoured chewing gum, with a choice of lemon, cherry, orange or plum. The Liberty Bell was retained, along with an image of a stick – or ‘bar’ – of Bell-Fruit Gum. The new symbols proved very popular, and had the added advantage of distancing the machines from their poker derivation. Other manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon and, somewhere along the way, a watermelon was added to the list of fruity iconography. The machines were not popular with the state courts in the USA, with two test cases finding that a mint vending machine was in fact a gambling device. But there was no holding back their popularity and it didn’t take long for the machines – now dispensing hard cash as opposed to chewing gum – to conquer the world.

Mechanical machines held sway until the 1960s, when the first electro-mechanical variants began to appear. I can still remember seeing the first such examples here in Britain, towards the end of the decade. But when visiting amusement arcades (almost always at the seaside) I still favoured the traditional ‘one-armed bandit’. There was something more appealing about cranking a handle and hearing the drums spinning inside the machine, a kind of visceral quality that the electronic versions lacked. Back in the 60s, we played for pennies, and no more considered it a form of gambling than we did the penny falls machines in those same seaside arcades. Later, the machines were uprated to accept 5p and 10p coins, which meant that you could end up spending a lot more, but the jackpot payouts were accordingly more attractive. Who could resist the sight and sound of all those shiny coins being disgorged into the chrome-plated hopper at the bottom of the machine?

It was believed – rightly or wrongly I can’t be sure – that the mechanical fruit machines could be ‘primed’ somehow by giving the lever a special sort of jerk. In reality, the only jerks were the ones who kept pumping in their shiny shillings. But those machines had a very definite appeal, and even when the payout was in mere copper coins, you couldn’t help feeling like a king when all that cash was dropped in your lap.

The new electro-mechanical machines were much bigger than their predecessors, and a lot more flashy, with most examples including animated light displays and even music. New features like ‘nudge’ and ‘hold’ were easy enough to grasp, but before long a bewildering range of options was on offer to the player, all of them, to my mind, detracting from the brilliant simplicity of simply pulling a handle and letting fate (or the devious machinations of the machine’s owners) take its course.

I always felt – correctly, as it turns out – that the electronic machines must be easier to ‘fix’ to increase the odds against jackpot payouts. As Wikipedia’s article on the subject has it, ‘the odds of losing symbols appearing on the payline became disproportionate to their actual frequency on the physical reel’ as a result of electronics incorporated into the design. It was often believed that the old mechanical machines could be rigged to avoid jackpot paylines, and I’m sure this was the case; but once electronics arrived on the scene, it was no longer a mere game of chance: the system was actively working against you.

When microprocessors entered the arena of gaming machines, the odds against winning became even higher. Makers could now assign specific probabilities to every symbol on every reel, goading players into parting with still more money after a near miss when the machine stopped just short of a winning line. In the 1980s, machines began to incorporate a system that directed coins into one of two reservoirs – one as payment for the owner, the other as potential prize money. As the prize money reservoir filled up, the odds on winning increased. This explains the phenomenon of watching a loser pumping money into a machine for ages, only for the next player to step up and immediately score a winning line. By the same token, with the prize money depleted, the odds against a jackpot were considerably higher.

Today’s machines no longer make use of mechanical components, and now employ as many as five reels within a computerised display. If you’re ever tempted by one of these devices, think again – the odds against winning can be as high as 300 million to one. You’ve got more chance of winning the lottery or being hit by an asteroid.

There was one form of gaming machine that it was possible to defeat, by sheer brain power. In the 1980s, our local pub introduced a quiz machine that payed out handsomely if you could make it through the various stages towards the jackpot level. A group of us – all ex-grammar school boys, with plenty of trivial and general knowledge at our disposal – took on the machine and began to score jackpots of over £30 a time. My diary for 1986 records that on one evening, a team of five of us walked away with £6 each. Someone must have tumbled, because the machine was soon removed, later to be replaced by a new variant based on the TV game Blockbusters, which was ‘much harder’ according to the diary. In a fair game of cash for answers, it was all too easy to beat the system and I’m sure we weren’t the only ones cashing in. One night, the machine even ran out of money! But as far as any other gaming machine goes, there is only ever one guaranteed winner – the company who supplies it!


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