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Bell-Fruit Games (BFG) has been a mainstay of the British slots industry for 50 years. Primarily concerned with games design and technology, the firm is fixed on the land-based market. They currently design and manufacture popular fruities for supply in the UK and across Europe and the world.
Although you won't find too many online Bell-Fruit games in 2016, there are plenty of innovative fruit machines in British pubs up and down the country. Let's take a closer look at why Bell-Fruit are such a market leader.
About Bell-Fruit
Bell-Fruit has been around since the 1960s - then set up as Bell-Fruit Manufacturing Co. Ltd - producing fruit machines and bingo games for the UK market.
The Bell-Fruit Group is actually two companies in one: Bell-Fruit Games (BFG) designs AWP-style machines for pubs and bingo clubs, as does QPS Interactive. Meanwhile, the firm's Mazooma Interactive arm - formed in 1997 - produces terminals for betting shops on the UK high street.
Bell-Fruit - based in Nottingham in England - now employs over 200 people and continues to develop and manufacture slot machines for the worldwide gaming markets.
In 2012, Bell-Fruit was bought by Astra Games Ltd, part of the Novomatic Group. Both Bell-Fruit and Mazooma now form part of the Novomatic giant.
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Popular Slots
Big branded fruit machines like VIP Deal or No Deal - in that case formed as part of the developer's deal with Endemol - are Bell-Fruit's bread and butter.
Deal or No Deal Box 23 - a hit for the developer in 2014 - was developed as a Category B machine for pubs and features a single win line.
However, it does come with plenty of features from the TV gameshow. After playing the machine, players can either decide to collect the 'Banker's Offer' or gamble it up to win more cash hidden in Box 23. Deal or No Deal fans can also enjoy the Hyper Deal or No Deal game.
QUEEN - We Are the Champions is packed with Hi-Lo Shuffle options, a Skill element, and a big jackpot of £100. Three Freddie Mercury symbols triggers a game board but it's the 'Deal or No Deal'-style bonus - which gives players the choice of rejecting or accepting various offers - that makes the machine stand out.
Jiggin' Jackpots, meanwhile, has a Celtic theme (but then, which leading slot machine developer doesn't?) with a 3-reel machine packed with the familiar cherries, melons, oranges and red 7s, but also pots of gold and four-leaf clovers as standard.
The Category C game (carrying a £100 jackpot, meaning you'll find the game in pubs) has a progressive cashpot where you can trigger a special 'Gold Fever' bonus round. Collect three Horseshows, meanwhile, and you'll activate the Super Board where the big jackpots can be won. Nudges can even be banked for the next game.
Where did the idea of putting fruit in a fruit machine come from? The history of today’s fruit machine is a story about chewing gum, free beer, and legal loopholes.
In 1891 Sittman and Pitt of Brooklyn, New York, developed a gambling machine, the precursor to the modern slot machine, and the fruity’s great grandfather. The original game contained five drums holding 50 playing cards and was based on poker. Why not all 52 cards? To give the house the edge, of course. With the ten of spades and jack of hearts removed, the odds of landing a royal flush were cut in half. Regardless, the machine proved extremely popular and could soon be found in bars all over the city. Players would insert a nickel and pull a lever, which would spin the drums and the cards they held, while the player crossed his fingers for a good hand.
The original machines had no payout mechanism, so a pair of kings might get the player a free beer, whereas a royal flush could pay out cigars or shots, the prizes wholly dependent on what was on offer at the bar. Due to the vast number of possible wins with the original poker card based game, it proved practically impossible to come up with a way to make a machine capable of making an automatic payout for all possible winning combinations.
In the late 1800s, Charles Fey of San Francisco, California, devised a much simpler machine called the Liberty Bell, with three spinning reels containing only five symbols: diamonds, hearts, horseshoes, spades, and the namesake Liberty Bell. By replacing ten cards with five symbols and using three reels instead of five drums, the complexity of reading a win was vastly reduced, allowing Fey to devise an effective automatic payout mechanism. Liberty Bell was a huge success and spawned a thriving mechanical gaming device industry.
Other early machines, such as the trade stimulator, gave out winnings in the form of fruit-flavoured chewing gums with pictures of the flavours as symbols on the reels. The popular cherry and melon symbols derive from this machine. The BAR symbol now common in slot machines was derived from an early logo of the Bell-Fruit Gum Company. The payment of food prizes was a commonly used technique to sneakily avoid laws against gambling in a number of American states.
In 1963, Bally developed the first fully electromechanical slot machine, called Money Honey. The state-of-the-art technology allowed Money Honey to be the first slot machine with a bottomless hopper and automatic payout of up to 500 coins without the help of an attendant. The popularity of this machine led to the increasing predominance of electronic games, and the side lever soon became vestigial.
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During the 1960s electric gambling machines were exported to the UK, featuring many of the popular fruit symbols we recognise today. However, UK gambling law was very clear about the nature of automatic gambling machines and they were not allowed in pubs. The crux of the law revolves around the level of interaction while gambling. Automatic gambling machines were illegal for sure, but what if you could show that fruit machines were games of skill? Time for some more legal sneakiness.
To add an element of interactivity to a gambling machine, Trevor Carter, co-founder of Carfield Engineers Ltd introduced the Nudge button. Thanks to the Nudge button, a fruit machine transformed from being a totally random betting machine to a game of skill. Strategic use of Nudges and later, Holds, allowed fruit machines to slip through the legal net and be enjoyed with a pint in your local pub.
As technology advanced through video and digital machines, the fruit was joined by popular cultural franchises from The Addams Family and Terminator, to the ubiquitous Deal or No Deal. Each one featuring their own graphics and sounds, but still retaining a little bit of their heritage.
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So there you have it! Thanks to chewing gum and a little ingenuity, we have the fruit machine you enjoy today.