Slot reels and card tables have been squeezed onto ever-smaller glass since the 1970s. Anyone who grew up on handhelds will recognize the design tricks that came out of it.
Slot reels used to be physical drums. For roughly eight decades after Charles Fey’s Liberty Bell, a slot machine meant springs and gears, plus a lever you yanked hard enough to feel it in your shoulder the next morning.
Then in 1976 the Las Vegas-based Fortune Coin Co. swapped the drums for a television screen, and the first units went on trial at the Las Vegas Hilton.
Fifty years later, that screen fits in a jacket pocket. Fortune Coin’s descendants are now pokies from studios like Pragmatic Play and Hacksaw Gaming, tapped through on a phone instead of a cabinet. An online casino such as SpinBet offers more than 5,000 of these titles, to players who might never touch a desktop – and certainly won’t have spun an old-school slot before.
It took four decades of shrinking screens and clumsy controls to get from a Vegas cabinet to that phone lobby, and designers solved each problem roughly in the order the hardware forced them to.
From Cabinet Glass to TV Reels
Fortune Coin’s machine wasn’t a curiosity for long. IGT bought the company and its video-slot technology in 1978, and the format spread through Strip and downtown casinos once the cheat-proofing was sorted out.
Pixels freed the reels from physics. A physical drum only has room for a limited set of symbols before it gets too big and heavy to spin properly, but a screen doesn’t care how much you draw on it.
WMS took things further in 1996 with Reel ’Em In, the first American video slot to send players to a second screen for a bonus round.
Every phone pokie with a separate free-spins scene owes a debt to that fishing-themed cabinet, even if the “second screen” is now a five-inch display with a different background swapped in.
Card Tables on the Game Boy
Home consoles got their own casinos too. Sofel’s Casino Kid gave NES owners a blackjack and poker circuit in 1989, complete with rival gamblers to beat at each table.
Handhelds were a much tougher brief. Nintendo’s Game Boy offered a 160 by 144 pixel screen with four shades of green-gray and no backlight, which is a rough canvas for a deck of 52 cards.
HAL Laboratory’s Vegas Stakes jumped from the Super Nintendo to the Game Boy in 1995 and got around this with fat card sprites and menus that only ever asked for one decision at a time. Over on the Game Gear, Sega had color and a backlight to work with, though the handheld ate through six AA batteries in roughly three to five hours of play. Its four Poker Face Paul’s card games arrived in 1994, and GamePro wasn’t kind about their graphics in its July issue that year.
Fire up Vegas Stakes on an original brick Game Boy today and the card faces are readable, just about, you’ll still catch yourself tilting the console toward a lamp to pick out a club from a spade.
Keypads, Flash and the Touchscreen Break
Mobile phones came next, and for a while they were worse. Java-based handsets in the mid-2000s offered blackjack and video poker played on a number pad, which worked about as well as you’d expect.
Apple changed the input before anybody changed the games. Its original iPhone arrived in June 2007 with a 3.5-inch touchscreen and no keypad at all, and the App Store followed in July 2008.
But browser casino games of the time were Flash files, and Apple refused to support Flash on its phones.
Steve Jobs laid out the reasoning in an open letter in April 2010, republished in full by AppleInsider.
His view was blunt: “Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers.” Hover effects and right-click menus had no place on glass you poke with a thumb.
Developers took the hint slowly. Adobe announced in July 2017 that it would wind down Flash Player, and support officially ended on December 31, 2020. By then, studios had rewritten their catalogs in HTML5, which works in any mobile browser without a plug-in.
Five Eras of Shrinking Screens
Each hardware jump forced a different compromise on game designers.
| Era | Hardware | Screen limit | Design fix |
| 1976 | Fortune Coin video slot | One TV screen in a casino cabinet | Reels drawn as graphics, free of drum size |
| 1989–1995 | Game Boy and Game Gear | 160 x 144 pixel LCDs | Big card sprites, one decision per menu |
| Mid-2000s | Java feature phones | Keypad input on tiny displays | Number keys mapped to deal and hold |
| 2007–2010 | iPhone and touch devices | 3.5-inch touchscreen with no Flash | Large tap targets and HTML5 rewrites |
| 2021 onward | Portrait-first pokies | Tall, narrow phone screens | Grids with scatter pays sized for one hand |
Portrait Pokies and the One-Thumb Lobby
Paylines were the next casualty.
Nobody enjoys tracing 20 zig-zag lines across a phone screen, so studios moved toward grids that pay for matching symbols anywhere. Pragmatic Play’s Gates of Olympus, released in early 2021, uses a 6×5 grid where eight or more matching symbols pay wherever they fall before tumbling away for new ones. Sugar Rush went bigger with a 7×7 board of candy clusters.
Hacksaw Gaming went the other way. Its Wanted Dead or a Wild uses a compact 5×5 grid that fills a phone screen without much empty space around the edges, which is a small thing until you’ve squinted at a wide horizontal slot crammed into a vertical frame.
Follow-ups like Gates of Olympus 1000 and Sugar Rush 1000, plus the Super Scatter versions of both, are in the SpinBet pokies lineup. They’re good examples of why the format took over, since you can play a round one-handed on a bus without zooming in on anything.
Small-screen design changes that stuck once phones became the main way to play:
- Bigger spin buttons, parked low on the screen where your thumb rests
- In portrait mode, bet sizes tucked into a slide-up panel instead of a row of plus and minus keys
- Swap paylines for scatter pays, so nobody has to trace lines across a five-inch display
- Quick-spin toggles for shorter sessions on the go
SpinBet applies this thinking well past the pokies. The site plays on the web as well as on iOS and Android devices, and its live dealer blackjack and roulette tables stream to the same phone screen. Payments fit the format too. Apple Pay and crypto are both deposit options, and withdrawals are generally processed within an hour.
For players in New Zealand, SpinBet NZ has deposit and loss limits, session limits, time-outs and self-exclusion, all set from the account settings.
Where Retro Fans Fit In
Not everyone thinks the shrinking was progress. Pull the handle on a restored Bally Money Honey from 1963 and there’s a weight to it that a tap on glass can’t fake.
A 7×7 cluster grid is clever, sure. Vegas Stakes on a Game Boy with a dying battery has a charm the cluster grid can’t match, though that might be nostalgia doing the talking.
And the Game Gear card games had one feature no modern pokie offers: six AA batteries that usually gave out before a session got anywhere near long. Batteries are still a talking point for handheld fans, too, as this magazine’s column on power cores and the Chromatic points out, with ModRetro’s Game Boy-style handheld still taking AAs in 2026.
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