Monopoly Slots Give Iconic Board Game a Run for the Money

If you're a fan of Monopoly-themed slot games, you're going to love the news released earlier this summer by WMS Gaming.

The company which took Monopoly directly to "GO" on casino floors a decade ago announced it had extended through 2016 its long-term license agreement with Hasbro, Inc. and Hasbro International, Inc. for exclusive worldwide rights to develop and produce slot machines and other gaming machines featuring the iconic brand.

WMS has released over 60 different themes on Monopoly across all of its game categories, including wide-area progressives, local-area progressives, and stand-alone games. Twelve of the games have been released over the last two fiscal years alone.

"Monopoly has been wildly successful and is our flagship brand," said Orrin J. Edidin, president of WMS Gaming, which has its corporate headquarters in Waukegan, Illinois and a technology and research campus on the North Side of Chicago.

"A familiar branding like Monopoly is a great way to get a player to the game and begin playing. People are very familiar with Monopoly; it's something they recall from their earliest years, and this creates a comfort level.

"While it's a great attraction, a great brand won't save a bad game. If you have a great brand that has a logical connection to a great game, then you're off to the races. It's going to succeed."

There's even better news: The expanded agreement brought with it successful negotiations to include other timeless Hasbro games, including Battleship and Clue, plus brands that have yet to be announced.

"It's a very broad license with which we are very comfortable making that additional investment to continue innovating on the Monopoly brand and other Hasbro brands," Edidin said.

WMS has adapted the Monopoly theme to virtually all of its incredibly successful game categories, including Transmissive Reels, in which traditional spinning reels are blended with video technology to create a 3D effect, which, according to Edidin, "takes player interactivity in a casino environment to an entirely new level".

The company banks heavily on what it calls player-driven innovation, a process by which it solicits feedback from a nationwide research group of 3,500 slot players.

"It's a little bit risky when you consider the types of technologies and innovations that are brand new to a casino floor, but once the players connect to it, they tend to get a higher entertainment value, a higher level of interactivity, and longer playing time," he added.

WMS remains committed to investing in research and development, as well as their license and acquire strategy, to perpetuate its tradition of unique approaches to gaming that always seems to give players a new experience.

"We have things in our lab that will be commercialized over the next one to three years that are particularly exciting when you consider the enablements brought to bear by what we call network gaming, sometimes called server-based gaming," Edidin revealed.

"It will allow us to do things for the players in terms of personal intimacy that we can't do on a stand alone basis. It's really going to revolutionize the casino floor."