Movies that inspired online slot games
“Movies are now no longer freestanding IP; they are one piece in a marketing assault” (Alpert & Jacobs 2004)
Popular among players, slots dominate the game content of any real-money online casino. It is common for online casino operators to offer their players hundreds and even thousands of slot titles to choose from. This diversity, however, makes it increasingly more difficult for casinos to differentiate themselves on the crowded market. One way to tackle this problem is to offer games that possess unique yet recognisable themes, such as games based on popular movies.
Film-to-game adaptations are ubiquitous in the traditional video game industry and there exists a large body of research related to this phenomenon (e.g., Aarseth 2006; Hall 2011; Knight 2018, and references therein). However, little attention has been paid to such adaptations in slot games, despite the importance of the latter as a revenue driver in the multi-billion iGaming industry. This article is an attempt to partly address this knowledge gap by providing a descriptive analysis of a representative sample of movie-themed online slot games, with focus on the following questions:
- what are the main genres of films that get adapted into slot games?
