Big Bertha

Big Bertha machines needed engines with five-horsepower in order to power their reels. With 160 symbols for the reels, higher degrees of randomness could be achieved.

The three-reel era was usually restricted to just fifteen symbols per reel, though, so the high payouts could not exceed a few hundred dollars. Casino owners fought hard for this because they wanted to provide bigger jackpots as they knew this would bring more customers in.

Big Bertha - Pros and Cons

Big Bertha happened to have a very successful debut, but it soon got replaced by a bigger deluxe machine that was even grander than itself. This grand Big Bertha came with eight reels, each of which had twenty symbols on them. It cost around $150,000 to make, though, so its availability was greatly limited. The casinos in Las Vegas usually featured these bigger machines and their bigger jackpots attracted slots gamblers even more.

The biggest problem with Big Bertha (aside from its cost) was that the chances of hitting the jackpot were incredibly slim. The odds were about 1 in 15 billion, so even millions or billions of spins were very unlikely to bring about a jackpot.

The Appearance of the RNG

The deluxe version of Big Bertha, as well as various other similar big-reeled machines, became obsolete because of RNGs. RNGs are internal computers that randomly choose numbers to correspond to the alignments of reel symbols.

Whenever a random number is generated, the slot machine with the RNG displays the corresponding symbols and pays out whenever necessary. With the RNG, slot machines that had high jackpots no longer had to be expensive and big monstrosities.

Thanks to the RNG, a way was paved to include progressive jackpots that helped fuel how popular the majority of well-known slot machines became the world over, like the Wheel of Fortune machine. Nowadays, Big Bertha can only be found in museums, though.