If you’re here, that means you must have played a whole ton of slots! Maybe you liked some, but not others, or maybe most slots you play are enjoyable to you. Either way, I’m sure you’ve noticed that a lot of them tend to be very different. Sure, there’s some which are just carbon copies of each other (looking straight at you, IGT), but most have at least one small thing which makes them unique, like a special minigame or a bonus feature. It’s not uncommon at all for slots these days to have at least one element which is a bit more interactive – a game that you activate by getting special symbols (usually called “scatters”) which provides a nice change of pace and a decent reward following it. But not every slot has a bonus game – some, such as “Mega Moolah” or a lot of IGT slots, prefer to stick to the basics and still manage to remain popular. So the question is, how important are bonus games, really?
I think that, to answer the question lies in the games themselves, and in what people expect from them when playing slots. First, let’s take a look at the slots which have bonus games and try to discover what they have in common. “South Park”, for example, is famous for having tons of very fun bonus games and bonus rounds. These range from interactive (spraying hippies with a fire extinguisher in the park or leading Kenny through a street without getting him run over by a car) to passive (playing ‘kick the baby’ and getting bonuses to your free spins)… But then again, if you know anything about “South Park”, you’d know that this is all par for the course. The franchise has always had the potential for wacky and fun games, so it’s really no surprise that the slot was designed in this way. As a matter of fact, if you look at all slots that have bonus games, a good chunk of them have been based on something – “King Kong”, “The Avengers”, “Jurassic Park”, “Aliens” and so on and so forth.
Meanwhile, slots that don’t have bonus games are seldom based on an actual property. “Mega Moolah”, for example, is based on the theme of animals being fifty shades of crazy in an African savannah. But have you noticed something interesting about the slots which don’t feature bonus games? They all have something else that’s drawing the players in, most often a jackpot. Since people will be playing these slots for the jackpots anyway, a bonus game simply isn’t necessary. But for non-jackpot slots, especially those based on a license, the presence or lack of a bonus game can make or break it. But most importantly, a bonus game can bring a slot that much closer to its license, and as a result appeal that much more to the fans of the license.