Laugh Development
The appeal of the newest multiline video slots begins
in the bonus round, and Williams has some of the best
• by Frank Legato

The bonus games on today’s multiline video slots have injected new life into slot floors across the country. These days, secondary bonus games must do more than pay money—they have to make you laugh.

The manufacturer responsible for initiating this requirement, perhaps more than any other, is Chicago’s Williams/WMS Gaming.

The popularity of Williams’ bonus games is one result of a conscious process on the part of the manufacturer’s management to make creativity a job requirement—regardless of the particular specialty of an employee, says John Giobbi, director of product development. And multiple disciplines are required to make any funny idea come through a slot machine to the player.

Although anyone in the company can contribute ideas for game development, Giobbi says a few key people come up with the majority of the ideas. Most of the ideas are conceived by a group that meets weekly, and includes the head of the department representing each of the various disciplines going into developing a slot machine.

The team brainstorms ideas, decides on the format and types of features to include, and displays different ideas in story-board form (basically, several frames, like in a comic strip). "Once in a while, we will develop several ideas and bring in players to participate in focus groups," Giobbi says. "We usually do that at casinos, sometimes with names selected from surveys we did earlier, other times with names provided by a casino."

Once a game is selected for development, each department head will select a representative for the game development team. That team is responsible for turning all the concepts into reality.

The success of Williams’ slots serves as proof of the professionalism within the teams. The software engineers "push each game to the limits" of the WMS video platform, says Senior Game Designer Joel Jaffe, who adds that maximizing the capabilities of the hardware with feature-rich games often leads to more work when securing approval in the varied gaming jurisdictions.

The Sound Department representative on each development team not only deals with selecting the music and sound effects to convey the theme; he or she also must find the best talent for voice-overs. According to Sound Department Manager Dave Zabriskie, the development staff has voice talent agencies send people over to audition for the job of the voice in each game. "We get the best talent not only in the Chicago area, but all over the country," he says. "Today’s technology allows for recording at local studios anywhere."

But how do they come up with all that hilarious material for the bonus games?

While each of the development team members on a given game come up with funny stuff, the goofy ideas generally originate at the weekly brainstorming sessions.

A prime example:

The slot game "Top Banana" has one of the most bizarrely hilarious bonus rounds anywhere. Called "Stack the Monkeys," it involves a beach scene with characters including a female hippo in a tutu, several monkeys and a gorilla. The player pushes a button and the hippo lady—who makes wisecracks in a snooty, rich-lady voice, by the way—jumps from a cliff into a bucket of water perched on one end of a see-saw, which is sitting atop a turtle. On the other side of the see-saw is a monkey, who is catapulted into the air when the hippo lands, and onto the shoulders of another monkey. The other monkey is next to a palm tree, at the top of which a gorilla dangles bananas. The object is to "stack" enough monkeys to grab the bananas before all the monkeys topple over.

Game Development Supervisor Damon Gura says the slot originated with the simple idea of a game about monkeys and bananas. "The name came first on this one," he says. "Usually, it’s the other way around." After brainstorming resulted in the basics for the game, different people in the development group came up with various refinements.

As Gura describes the development sessions that resulted in the monkey-stacking bonus game, he begins to laugh all over again. "It was originally planned as a monkey pushing a rock," he says. "The artists came up with the idea of having a hippo jump off a cliff. Then one day we came up with the idea of the hippo character having a tutu, and that she should jump into a bucket of water...and having the turtle’s eyes bug out..."

(Pause for laughing)

"We have a lot of people in this company who have watched a lot of 1940s cartoons," Gura says, "so we’re really good at coming up with cartoon slapstick."

"I find all of our games fun to play," adds Art Director Darryl Hughes, "because of the fun we always try to have in creating them. There is something new and different every time; it is a challenge every time we do a new game."