Pokies and Slot Machine Information

Pokies in the 90’s

January 3, 2007 on 2:31 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments

I won’t bore you too much about the 70’s and 80’s this time around. We will move on to the 1990’s.

By the 90’s it was either video display or stepping motors, the latter finally biting the dust by the turn of the century.

My favourite games from that era were Black Rhino, Cagey Bird, Hearts, Golden Canary and Chicken Run.

In the 80’s and early 90’s pokies still took 5-10 & 20 cent coins, it used to take ages to feed $20 into them, and then the $1 coin acceptors came in, faster loading time meant less down time on feeding the hungry blighters. Overnight all the shrapnel the pubs and clubs had to keep on hand disappeared.

Finally note acceptors arrived, the salvation to harried bar staff, except in QLD where Pokies only accept $5 $10 and $20 bills, and only up to the value of $100 on the credit meter. The government did try $20 maximum and state wide turnover dropped 40% in a week so it didn’t take long for the govt bean counters to figure out that less turnover equates to less tax revenue.

Things were reversed to five $20 bills again and everybody in pokie land was happy again and flocked back to their favourite venue, much to the delight of the government and venue owners.

The point of the machines not accepting $50 and $100 bills in Queensland was supposedly to reduce problem gambling. Quite easy to work arround – casinos have simply installed note changers everywhere – making it very easy to convert those nasty $100 bills into acceptable $20 bills!

We will look at the new millennium next. Lots of exciting things to come

Lawrie