Why Do Slot Machines Use Fruit Symbols?
Feb. 25 2024, Published 1:38 p.m. ET
When you see fruit in slot machines, you must think to yourself how amusing that is. Indeed, fruit symbols are almost as refreshing and invigorating as tasting real fruit, especially when you get three in a row.
However, the pleasant looks and positive mental images aren’t the main reasons why fruit reels were used in old analog slot machines.
In this piece, we’ll explain the origins of fruit symbols in slot machines.
Present-Day Fruit Combos
If you’ve ever taken a spin on a slot machine, either a one-armed bandit or a more modern online offering, like those on this list, you must have seen a variety of fruits coming up. We do hope you’ve also experienced the joy of hitting three identical symbols and winning the jackpot.
Anyway, you might have asked yourself how many fruit symbols can appear on a slot screen. Is the number finite and pre-defined, or could there be any random fruits appearing on the screen?
The answer is that the number of fruit symbols in slot machines has been the same for more than 100 years, with slight alterations. It’s melons, cherries, lemons, strawberries, plus oranges, plums, and grapes. Even though some other types of fruit might appear (or a pear) along the way, those seven items are the most common.
Pull It Again, Sam!
About 50 years before Casablanca changed the history of movies, one-armed bandits – the predecessors of slot machines – had already been in use in the USA. The fly in the ointment wasn’t that the player had to pull the lever to make the symbols spin – it was a state-of-the-art mechanism for that time.
The problem was that a vendor had to be present to pay out the reward when someone would score the same symbols. The prize was usually a token or a ticket. It was inconvenient for vendors, so they were looking for a handier solution to improve the way slot machines work.
In 1893, an updated version of the payout system was introduced, enabling automatic, no-operator-present payouts. Then in 1894/1895 a Bavarian-American engineer and inventor Charles Fey improved that machine so that it could pay out coins. This was a significant landmark in the development of slot machines because now players would want to play more and more: They knew they could win real money instead of tickets and tokens.
Fey launched a slot machine manufacturing company a few years after and kept changing the game (literally). The two other major contributions of his innovative mind to the world of gambling were the Liberty Bell slot machine and the detecting pin. The former is the first full-fledged slot machine comparable to its modern counterparts. When three bells appeared, it would actually ring a bell – a tradition cherished in many casinos to this very day – and pay out coins. The pin, on the other hand, could tell real coins from fake ones, disabling dishonest players to cheat the machine.
Alright, but where has all the fruit gone? It hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s yet to come up; amusing details following.
The Law Chewing up the Slot Machine
By the early 1900s, the Golden State had adopted stricter gambling regulations, putting real-money slot machines out of law. The same was going on in major parts of the US.
When Fey was doing his magic, paving the way for the slot machine we know today, California was already hard on gambling, and he couldn’t protect his innovations with patents. Hence, the competition soon caught up with his work and implemented his ideas into their own work.
While he didn’t manage to make a living from his innovative thinking, he unintentionally fertilized the ground for fruit symbols.
To be more precise, The Industry Novelty Company repurposed once-slot machines into chewing-gum dispensers. The thing is that slot machines had become quite popular throughout the US before the legal ban. This market slot (literally) made room for a reinvention: chewing gums, and now we’re getting closer to the pinnacle of this article; as they come with different flavors, vendors introduced fruit symbols instead of the bells, card symbols, and other previously used options.
Those new vending machines didn’t have the gambling function anymore, but they still kept bringing money to vendors, this time from a different audience.
Now families would gather around gum dispensers, trying to make three fruit symbols match and win a package of chewing gums. So, chewing gums aren’t only utilized to reveal crime perpetrators but they have been used for other purposes, vending revenue included.
Modern-day Fruit Machines
As the authorities continued to change gambling regulations and technology kept moving forward, new opportunities emerged for fruit symbols and slot machines.
In the 1960s, Money Honey and Big Berths were the two game-changing slot machines. The former was the first successful slot machine with fruit symbols that operated through electric motors. The latter was a gigantic, more advanced machine, also operating through an electromechanical system.
The mid-70s saw the first video slot machine that took the world by storm in the 1980s, spreading to various corners of the globe.
From the 1990s onward, we’ve been witnessing a swift development of diverse fruit-based slot machines in the offline and online reality.
Even though these fruits don’t taste the same for every player, slot machines and their fruit symbols have become a household image, with millions of players worldwide. We can expect further development of slot machines and wackier fruit designs in the future.