Four Landmark Microgaming Slots

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Microgaming has over 300 online slot games in its portfolio. This article selects four slots from these. The choice will not be based on the popularity of the games or on personal preferences. The four are being picked because they have in some way contributed to the online slots community.

Tomb Raider is the first slot in this list. It was the first branded online slot game that sought to take the brand equity of an existing product and multiply it through the slot game. Tomb Raider was a video game created by Eidos Interactive. The video game featured the sexy female adventuress Lara Croft. The slot game exploited the graphics of the video game and was an instant hit. Though Microgaming did develop a sequel to Tomb Raider it did not significantly build upon the concept of branded slots. However Microgaming’s competitor, Cryptologic, exploited the full value of branded slots through its Marvel Comics series. Hence though Microgaming introduced branded slots to the industry it is Cryptologic that is associated with them today.

The progressive jackpot Mega Moolah is next on the list. It was the first Microgaming progressive jackpot that was reset to a million dollars. Hence a minimum of million dollars will be paid out every time Mega Moolah is hit. Though million dollar payouts were not unknown in the industry before, Mega Moolah has notched up expectations with its highest hit of over six million dollars. There are other progressive jackpots from other software providers with histories of comparative payouts. But Microgaming’s payout policy makes Mega Moolah unique among them. Mega Moolah offers the million dollars plus payouts in one stroke as soon as the hit is verified. Other software providers have a policy of paying the progressive jackpot amounts in instalments.

My Slot was a slot game that failed to capture the imagination of the industry despite being unique. My Slot allows players to upload graphics and music so that they can play a slot game with an intimately personal theme like a birthday party or a vacation. It is impossible to say how many players have taken advantage of this offering but My Slot is conspicuous by its absence in casino news and forums. One reason could be that differently personalized My Slot games are for all practical purposes different games and hence it has failed at a collective level. But this excellent concept did not have a single imitator from any software developer.

Burning Desire, however, was instantly copied by almost all other software developers. The innovative feature about Burning Desire was that it did away with defined paylines and any combination on successive reels led to a payout. For the usual 3 rows on the reels there were 243 possible ways to win. Grail Maiden from Vegas Technology and Savannah Sunrise from Cryptologic are slots that have taken up the all pays concept. Later Microgaming launched Arctic Fortune that had four rows and 1024 ways to win.

Microgaming has announced that it would be releasing a slot game based on Lord of the Rings in conjunction with Warner Bros. Given the expectation that this has created and looking at the brand equity of Lord of the Rings one hopes that the slot game would be a landmark slot game among landmark slot games.

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