Retro fashion continues to dominate many areas of the entertainment industry, with online slots one of the areas where our love of the past shines brightly. The retro slots category contains a variety of games, but what do they look like and what do they offer players?
Simple, Clear Gameplay
The first thing you’ll notice is that retro slots tend to be simple to look at. The reason for this is that they’re loosely based on the earliest slot machines, where players pulled a lever to spin three reels. While other slots have introduced more diverse gameplay with a variety of features, retro games typically have few features to distract from the basic idea of trying to get a matching set of symbols across the reels.
Retro appeal can be seen when you enjoy the Starburst game online. This slot by NetEnt has a simple setup where five reels are filled with gems of different shapes and colours. Expanding wilds that trigger a respin when they appear provide this game’s only bonus feature. Apart from that, wins can be made over the ten paylines across the five reels.
Other retro slots have the same three-reel format that the original machines featured. This sets them apart from the latest releases, which often have five reels, although others have a larger number of reels. The number of reels can change as new features are unlocked on some slots, but retro games are unlikely to have that sort of feature.
Classic Themes
To understand why certain themes and images are popular in retro slots, we need to again go back in time to the early days of innovative machines like the Liberty Bell slot invented by Charles Fey in the late 19th century. These games had symbols like bells and playing card suits.
A later trend saw fruits used as a way of representing the chewing gum flavours that players could win in the days when cash prizes weren’t allowed. Fruitinator by Blueprint updates this theme on a modern slot that has a classic look but is linked to a progressive jackpot. Diamonds have typically been used to represent high-paying symbols, leading to a genre of slots that uses these precious stones together with other gems or luxury items.
New slots are now released on a huge variety of themes. From fishing trips to Count Dracula and other vampires, pirates and more, the range of ideas is vast and growing. This makes it easy to spot retro themes such as those seen in games like Blazing Bells and Coins on Fire. However, it usually isn’t clear at first sight whether a certain game follows the retro trend in terms of the gameplay as some use a retro theme but introduce more varied features.
It seems certain that the retro style of slot remains popular, as there will always be people who want to play this sort of game without any complicated features. Yet, the changing face of the slots industry also shows us that retro themes can be incorporated into more complex games that appeal to a different sort of player.
