Wheel of Fortune Slot Poker Hybrid Makes Its Debut for IGT
With a sinking share price, IGT’s new Wheel of Fortune Video Poker game has plenty riding on it.
Wheel of Fortune slots have been a Vegas casino feature for almost 30 years. © Getty Images
Key Facts:
- IGT delivers its latest Wheel of Fortune arrives in Vegas as company share price plummets.
- Famous TV game show is now 50, and Wheel of Fortune Slot will be 30 next year.
- $22 billion wiped from the value of the top 10 names in the US gaming sector.
- IGT is now facing a lawsuit in the Nevada US District Court.
International Game Technology (IGT), with its company headquarters in London, operating headquarters in Rome, Las Vegas, and Providence, Rhode Island, while listed on the New York Stock Exchange, may have plenty of restructuring to organise following Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’.
However, the global leader in gaming, employing 10,500 people and featuring multiple IGT casino sites, is likely to enjoy some respite thanks to its lovechild, the Wheel of Fortune Slot.
Last year, IGT announced that it had extended its licensing agreement with Sony Pictures Television to continue producing games related to its popular Wheel of Fortune TV game show until 2034.
Wheel of Fortune celebrated its 50th consecutive year of broadcast in January 2025. In 2026, thirty years will have passed since IGT unveiled the first Wheel of Fortune slot. It was the first licensed slot machine brand and a forerunner for the countless themed games featuring movies, television shows, bands, songs and celebrities that have followed.
The Wheel That Has Snowballed
Remarkably, the earliest Wheel of Fortune slot games did not feature the famous Wheel for which they are so famous. They were simple three-reeled mechanical-reel nickel slot games with a game-show theme.
However, significant progress followed, and IGT introduced the video version of Wheel in 2001. Additional pay lines and denominations soon followed. In 2006, IGT introduced the ‘Wheel of Fortune Super Spin’, a quick way to get more people to the game’s bonus features.
2018 saw the company unveil a new visual element to the game, True 4D, in which elements of the game seemingly jump off the video screen and into the player’s lap. There have been over 300 versions of the Wheel of Fortune slot game.
2009 was a big year for IGT’s money-spinner when a wide-area progressive system – linking machines from a broad area that feed money into single jackpot prize pools – saw a $14.4 million jackpot prize go to a Wheel of Fortune player in Mississippi.
Unsurprisingly hailed as one of the most successful slot themes of all time, IGT has paid out nearly $3.6 billion in jackpots and minted more than 1,200 millionaires since Wheel of Fortune’s debut.
In 2021, it was reported that a $100,000-plus jackpot is won in a land-based casino by someone playing a Wheel of Fortune slot every 65 hours. The game is also a hugely popular online slot in the UK.
Rebranding the Wheel as a Slot Hybrid
IGT rounded out a ‘transformational 2024‘ with news that the most prolific-themed slot ever made will soon have 11 new relatives. The latest variants debuted at October’s Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, where Wheel of Fortune Video Poker attracted the most attention.
New ways to spin, new ways to win with new Wheel of Fortune products! The most successful slot brand of all time is scaling to Video Poker, ETG, VLT, and introducing some smashing new hardware! Visit us to feel the thrill of our Wheel of Fortune Zone!#IGT #IGTxG2E4 @G2Eshows pic.twitter.com/u8zmLbxOzO
— IGT Jackpots (@IGTJackpots) October 8, 2024
This week, the company announced it had introduced the much-anticipated Wheel of Fortune Video Poker game to the world’s most prolific video poker market: Las Vegas. Guest of the Downtown Grand (in Downtown Las Vegas) had the distinction of playing the game first.
“Becoming the first casino in the world to offer IGT’s Wheel of Fortune Video Poker was an exciting moment for Downtown Grand and one that generated palpable buzz and significant play on our gaming floor,” said Rick Coltor, Slots Manager at the Downtown Grand Las Vegas.
“For decades, our players have enjoyed IGT video poker and Wheel of Fortune slots, so combining the DNA of those two products to create something new is an exciting proposition for our players.”
Billions Wiped and Potential for More
Combining the ever-popular video poker with the puzzle-solving, wheel-spinning fun of Wheel of Fortune would appear to be a pregnant cash cow in slot and poker-mad Las Vegas. However, economic turmoil means IGT’s new creation is unlikely to see a surge in its share value.
Over $22 billion has been wiped from the value of the top 10 names in the US gaming sector during the last month, as share prices have slumped on fears of the impact of a consumer slowdown due to Trump’s tariff schedule.
Furthermore, potentially costly legal action could lay ahead for IGT, with Reno attorney David O’Mara recently filing a lawsuit in US District Court in Nevada against the game maker and casino companies such as MGM Resorts International, Bally’s Corp. and Penn Entertainment Inc.
Not the Wheel of Physics
In December, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported the new lawsuit states, “the bonus wheel’s design is deceptive because even though its segments are of equal size, they don’t have an equal chance of landing on a certain segment because a computer program controls the outcome of the spin.”
“Before the advent of electronic gaming devices, casinos offered mechanical spinning wheel games of chance to their patrons,” the lawsuit says. “Roulette is a classic example of such a game. A commonly understood trait of these spinning wheel games is that the Wheel has an equal chance of stopping on each space.”
“That is because spinning wheels are naturally subject to the laws of physics and because the area of the wheel attributable to each number is the same, meaning the wheel has an equal chance of landing on 5 as it does 0.”
But that isn’t the case with the Wheel of Fortune bonus wheel, the lawsuit says. In modern-day slot machines, the outcomes of the spinning reels are pre-determined by a computer chip containing a random number generator.
