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Pokies Throughout History: From One-Armed Bandits To Video Screens
For close to 150 years, pokies have been the preferred style of gaming for people across the world.
Though today the the image of the flashing pokie--fashioned after popular movies or televisions shows--is popular today, when they were invented in the late 1880s these machines looked quite different.
The first pokie was created by Charles Fey of San Francisco in 1887, replacing the automated poker card based game and creating a simplified system. He used five symbols, including the traditional playing card suits along with horseshoes and a Liberty Bell.
Fey's system allowed for players to understand the game better and easily determine whether they had won or not. It came to be known as a "one-armed bandit" for the single lever that players used to operate the game.
The pokie was revised from there, with manufacturer Herbert Mills coming up with a new version called the Operator Bell shortly after Fey's version. Within a few years this version had taken over, and was seen across the American west in saloons, barber shops and brothels.
These early pokies gave way to fully automated, electronic machines in the 1960s similar to the versions seen today. Video pokies came in the next decade, when a group of developers working for a Las Vegas company created a modified television screen to display results.
Today this is the version of pokie that most gamers are familiar with, though many casinos give a nod to the past by using one of the old-fashioned "one-armed bandits."
