A Design That Never Needed a Rewrite
Charles Fey built the Liberty Bell in the back of his San Francisco workshop in 1895: three spinning reels, a handful of symbols, a single payline, and a mechanism simple enough to run on nothing but springs and gravity. According to Britannica’s history of the format, Fey’s design became the template every slot machine after it copied in some form, decades before anyone had coined the word “arcade.” There was no marketing department behind it and no focus group. Just a cabinet maker who happened to also be a mechanic, solving the problem of how to make a coin drop feel like an event.
That matters more to retro-gaming history than the machine’s reputation suggests. The slot reel is arguably the single design idea that survived every hardware transition our hobby has been through, mechanical to electromechanical, electromechanical to video, cabinet to browser tab, without ever changing its basic grammar. Pac-Man had to be reinvented for every console generation, rebuilt from the ground up each time the hardware moved on. The three-reel format just kept getting a new coat of paint. Compare how many design decisions from 1980 still ship untouched in a 2026 release, and the reel is close to alone in that company.
From Warehouse Prototype to Everyday Habit
What’s easy to miss, sitting in a room full of restored cabinets, is that the reel machines lining the back wall of any classic arcade auction aren’t a sideshow to gaming history. They’re one of its oldest continuous threads. Fortune Coin Co. built the first true video slot in a Las Vegas warehouse in 1976, swapping the physical reels for a modified 19-inch Sony television and a logic board, years before anyone was talking seriously about video games as an industry with a future. The instinct to digitize the reel came almost as early as the instinct to digitize anything else on a screen.
The early video units still simulated a mechanical spin because players expected to see one, even after the physical reels themselves became unnecessary. That’s the detail worth sitting with: the hardware moved on decades ago, but the visual language Fey settled on in 1895 was strong enough that nobody has seriously tried to replace it since. Every skin, every theme, every bonus round still runs through the same three-reel window.
The Reel Keeps Reinventing Itself
That lineage is why the format never really stopped moving. Speaking to Gambling.com, an independent editorial authority that covers where New Zealanders can access licensed reel games, one retro-arcade collector put it plainly: “Nobody redesigns the three-reel layout from scratch. Every developer inherits it, then decides how much of Fey’s original grammar to keep.”
That inheritance is why, if you play pokies online today, the reels, the payline logic, and even the anticipation before the last symbol lands still trace straight back to a wooden cabinet built for coin-operated saloons. The screen has changed. The pause before the last reel stops hasn’t.
New Zealand Catches Up With the Format
The market around those digital reels has kept pace with the design. New Zealand’s Online Casino Gambling Act came into force on 1 May 2026, and the government opened its expression-of-interest window for the country’s first 15 online casino licences in July, the first time New Zealand has built rules specifically for the format rather than treating it as an extension of land-based gaming law. It’s a reminder that the regulatory side of these machines is still catching up to a design that’s already 130 years old.
Old Hardware, Same Idea
None of that changes what’s sitting in the corner of a restoration workshop, though. A stripped-down electromechanical reel unit from the 1960s runs on the same logic as the app most people used to check their phone this week. Anyone who’s spent time cataloguing coin-op cabinets for a collection, the subject of our own coverage of coin-op arcade culture, will recognize the pattern instantly: the hardware keeps changing shape around an idea that never needed fixing in the first place. Fey wasn’t trying to invent an industry. He was trying to make a Saturday afternoon in a saloon a little more interesting. A hundred and thirty years later, that’s still the whole job.
