Do you remember the video game Frogger? I do; a quest to manoeuvre a frog across a busy highway without getting squelched by passing traffic.
Can’t remember who made it, however. I do remember that Space Invaders was built by Taito, though, and with the possibly exception of the original Atari Pong, that's the most iconic video game of all time.
Anyway, the point is that they were both at the big casino show, G2E in Las Vegas last week, where they featured as new "skill game" slots. This is apparently the new thing in the land-based casino industry. Nevada has passed a law approving the use of skill features in gambling machines.
The lawmakers’ philosophy, I would guess, is to water down the gambling elements in slots, make them more entertaining and generally look very noble. The industry has responded with games like Space Invaders and several other slot machines with skill features.
Will they succeed? Will the punters like them? More importantly, will the operators like them?
We’ve been there before of course. The Vegas show likes to have an overall theme. We have seen leasing come in; we have seen penny slots; going further back we have seen TITO, all as themes. And we have also seen "features" - AWP-style games with secondary games within them.
Those ideas might have worked to some degree. I cannot imagine that skill games will.
Talk to the always-enthusiastic slots suppliers and some of the execs from big operating companies and they always employ that heavily-overused and over-abused adjective "excited". They are excited by just about anything, to my jaundiced eye. And skill games is no different.
They will argue that the lawmakers are responding to the theory that millenials - the millennium people in our society; those born the other side of 2000 – grew up with amusement and video games and will like to have them transposed on top of the hard-nosed gambling game which is today’s casino slot.
My view is that those who play casino slots don’t want their attention diverted from the straightforward gamble. They don’t want to be "entertained", they don’t want to deviate; they don’t want the necessity to play a game with an element of skill to derive the better payback. In short, they don’t want to have to think.
The operators? They aren’t going to like skill games. No matter how shallow the skill element may be, it will logically extend the length of the game and anything that does that diminishes the cash box. The cash box remains king; and anything which threatens that will be shunned.
