International Game Technology
IGT will offer some great entertainment this year, including a new based on the blockbuster 1980s trilogy of Back to the Future films starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd.
The three installments of that film series about a teenager and his scientist friend who invents a time machine—traveling back to 1955, ahead to a very futuristic vision of 2015, and back the Old West—has always been regarded by fans as one long story. The game developers at IGT agreed, wrapping the entire trilogy into one feature-rich slot game.
In a talent coup for IGT, stars Fox (“Marty”), Lloyd (“Dr. Emmitt Brown”), and Thomas F. Wilson (“Biff”) all revised their roles in voice-overs for various bonus rounds of the slot machine. Features such as mystery wilds, picking bonuses and free spins all switch among the three time-travel destinations in the films.
Another of IGT’s major licensed brands this year presents a more recent box-office smash—the hit 2011 film Bridesmaids starring Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph. All of the memorable comedy bits from the film are depicted in high-definition video in five different bonus rounds, perhaps the best of which is an interactive picking bonus depicting the engagement-party scene in the Brazilian restaurant that leaves all of the bridesmaids violently ill with food poisoning.
The goal of the bonus is to pick food items from the restaurant’s “buffet” to give to bride Lillian (Rudolph) and the five bridesmaids, in the hopes that as few of the characters get sick as possible.
Other top IGT games arrive on the Center Stage community-style format, with its 103-inch monitor (70 inches in the smaller version) that gave players blockbuster themes like “American Idol” and “The Dark Knight.”
This year, another iconic film gets the Center Stage: Jurassic Park, in one of the format’s most effective uses yet. The original Jurassic Park, the popular film depicting an amusement-park habitat for cloned dinosaurs that goes horribly wrong. The big Center Stage screen provides a perfect format for the game’s main community-style bonus, in which players have to try to escape from the park before dinosaurs overtake their vehicle. When the bonus is triggered, the scene on the big screen is a jungle crossroad of several paths, from the perspective of inside the safety of a vehicle. Each player gets the chance to pick a path to get to the exit of the park without being noticed and attacked by dinosaurs.
The entire bank then views the harrowing escape attempt, as the vehicle slams through the jungle underbrush to try to find the park exit before one of the dinosaurs heads it off or catches up with it.
The other big thing from IGT this year will be a follow-up game in the “Reel Edge” series, the group of games launched last year with “Tully’s Treasure Hunt” and “Blood Life,” in which the bonus rounds are skill-based video-game sessions operated with a joystick to navigate 3D video images.
This year, the company brings a new version of the classic arcade game Centipede to the Reel Edge series.
