Wheel of Fortune games have been a staple on the casino floor for more than 25 years now. While many of the games are modern video slot machines and classic mechanical reels, it’s much harder nowadays to find some of the original classic Wheel of Fortune video reel machines.
Plaza in Las Vegas had three different variations on their floor in a few of my recent visits, with their machines hanging on after casinos like Bellagio and The D had pulled theirs. I thought it would be fun to look at the three versions I saw and just talk through them, because they were all still fun to play more than two decades later, even if they were not nearly the volatile experience modern slots tend to be today.
One thing that was noticeable about these games was the line hit potential. The Wheel of Fortune symbol is not only wild, but doubles line pays, so here’s a great example of a 50x line hit. It feels like a lot of slots nowadays have very anemic five of a kind pays, so getting this sort of a win is pretty fun.
Another was that, like many older machines, you could actually select how many lines you wanted to play, and the bet per line. So you could do 1 line if you really wanted to, for instance.
The game had a couple of features. Like other Wheel of Fortune games, you get the chance to spin the wheel, shown at the top. Depending on whether you got 3, 4 or 5 wheels on a line, that would yield 1, 3 or 5 spins, respectively.
Your wheel spin amount was multiplied by your line bet to determine the total prize for that spin.
There was also an envelope bonus. Like the bonus round at the time, you picked envelopes out of the word WHEEL.
You got three picks, and won the values of each picked. If 2 or more matched, you got a bonus for matching them.
Overall, the frequent bonusing and solid line hits made it a fun game to play. Its sister games are also fun; those will be written up in upcoming posts.
Wheel of Fortune Classic Slot Videos
RandomSlots has a video that also features the pay tables and a wheel bonus:
In the early days of Brian Christopher‘s channel, he got a wheel spin on this version:
