In the past I’ve written about Historic Horse Racing games on the site, and how they use a slot-like experience to bring that feel to what is effectively parimutuel betting, just like you would on a horse race.
Like other technologies like Bingo Machines, development started with a couple of smaller companies taking the lead, but more recently it’s attracted the attention of the various larger gaming companies. This means that more recent deployments of the technology are taking directions that look decidedly more like a Vegas-style slot floor, even when under the hood it’s not.
A reader of Know Your Slots shared this article which talks about Oak Grove Racing & Gaming, which has Historic Horse Racing games but with themes popular on Vegas-style slot floors such as Lock it Link, Cash Wheel and Fortune Gong.
The games will look and feel like Vegas-style slots for those who don’t know the difference, but under the hood you’re betting on horse racing, just like the machines that came before it. The key difference is now the games will look familiar to casino-goers, and that’s really the point.
For players, one key difference for Historic Horse Racing games is that you’re wagering into a pool and are playing against other players, not the house. There’s controls inside the software that let you more control your bets with more granularity, should you use, since you can bet on specific horses and such, just like you could any other horse race.
But by default they’re set to automatically wager for the best outcome, and when you do that it works really similarly to a slot in that you make your bet, and you either win or lose.
Leveraging the Vegas themes and creating more familiarity for players make make Historic Horse Racing machines more enticing for players and improve their viability as a slot machine alternative. And with the number and size of these facilities growing, it’s not surprising the major slot manufacturers are taking notice.
And while legal challenges continue to step up and try to stop its momentum, with new facilities like Oak Grove opening up, the horse seems to be out of the stable, as it were.
