hilolottery

The £100 randoms in pubs these days will empty your pockets more than any compensated fruit in a bad mood ever could. Nobody that plays them actually looks like they are enjoying themselves, usually stood in a zombie-like state. And let's not kid ourselves, someone.. somewhere.. will no doubt have something on a few of them, quietly getting on with it, filling their boots and moving on. The gambling commission don't know anything about the market they are tasked with regulating, so nothing has changed there either, leaving all scenarios just as likely as they ever were, online and land based. When I discovered fruit machines the highest stake was 10p, and I didn't find them all that interesting. I played video games and pinball more, along with the odd fruit. It was 20p play that changed things completely, I found the games suddenly became much more lively and Project came along with all their 20p machines - addictive as hell, I no doubt spent a fortune on them, but that was personal choice and the machines were fun on the whole. Arcades were busy so everything got a lot of throughput, and you would catch plenty of things at the right time too lending a little bit of balance to things. The £6 token jackpots came along and it will have been at this point I first played some of the designs by @Projectgilda - Indiana Jones was brilliant, you could even push it if you wanted and it was nice when you got £18 from the top. Try that on a £10 cash program and see how it goes. I remember arcades were still busy going into the £8/10 and 15 jackpot periods, but at £25 it was never quite the same. The dead periods were far more noticeable on the £25 jackpot upgrades and things only got worse from here. Less and less punters were willing to play through these dead periods, they liked the fun aspect of things which was getting harder and harder to cater for whilst incorporating the higher jackpots. @Projectgilda did a great job with his designs, they offered plenty at face value to accommodate casual play, yet offering something for those who liked to try and think outside the box, developing their own skills and strategies as they invested their own time and money in playing the games. Welcome to the forum.

From catching up on this thread it appears Betcom clearly had plenty of ideas on the go and were definitely making efforts to refresh the gameplay, it would be great to try some of these newer machines in one form or another.

They made interesting machines, is Edward B not on here? I remember he would engage on forums and was always open to ideas. Can't say I really got on with Trail Blazer but i'm not surprised there is more to it than meets the eye. If you hit the skill 7 style features on 4 would it auto skill the whole lot? Been a long time. I remember Rise to the Top looked interesting, although only ever saw one in a bookies where a punter was forever on my case. Not the best place to experiment. I liked a Mazooma (maybe QPS) called Stir Crazy, it had a barcode you could play for and one of the features was a true skill cash climb on the fruit symbols. If the skill climb went slow barcode would usually come straight back and do the same again. There were a few of them dotted around and I always did ok on them. I'm not sure tweaking the Cluedo features around on the £70 versions was the best idea in hindsight, I take it the idea was to make it harder to get number runner and wild thing, but with the features being red on pound stake a super 7 was never far away from a red line entry.

Thanks for the effort you put into the videos Choppers and sharing them with us, I enjoyed all the fruit related ones! Edit to add - I used to watch the Friday night (or was it a Sunday?) slot videos where you would upload various slots playing at the same time with the trance going in the background. Used to fall asleep to them, but in a good way. I remember Bruce Lee paid out for you.

It doesn't seem anything like 20 years ago since Chris released his amazing work, I have lots of great memories of playing various layouts, being on Fruit Forums and checking in daily. I felt like part of a community, and it all came about through the emulator. It will take a long time before it sinks in Chris is no longer with us. RIP Wizard, Legend