WMS Gaming are part of WMS Interactive, who in turn are a subsidiary of the American lottery and gaming giant Scientific Games. The company is one of the largest providers of slots – both real-world and online – in the world, and can trace its roots back all the way to 1943. The company has a strong portfolio of online gambling games, with a notable range of entertaining online slots.
WMS Gaming History
The lineage of WMS Gaming can be traced all the way back to 1943, when Harry Williams founded the Williams Manufacturing Company in Chicago. There was a craze in the US at the time for coin-op machines, and Williams decided to take advantage of it. He released two pinball machines and a fortune-telling game.
Harry Williams is credited with inventing the ’tilt’ mechanism for pinball. At the time, pinball machines were open to abuse as players could lift them in order to influence the passage of the ball. Williams’ device detected unfair machine manipulation and would then disable the machine until the ball had rolled out of play.
Williams Manufacturing Company became Williams Electronic Manufacturing Company in 1958 as the company began to add electronics to its machines. Williams’ games sold in their thousands and in 1964 Williams sold the company to the Seeburg Corporation.
Eventually the interest in pinball began to decline, and Williams Manufacturing Company (now known more simply as WMS) started to invest in slots machines instead. This became so successful that WMS closed its pinball division entirely in 1999.
Casinos began to spread across the US in the 1990s, whereas previously they could only be found mainly in Las Vegas. WMS released successful slots with TV and Movie tie-ins, such as Men in Black, Star Trek, The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings. As online casinos developed, WMS began to create online slots games as well, although they left their most popular casino slots as ‘real-world’ only so not to deter real-world play.
In late 2013 WMS merged with Scientific Games. It was estimated that Scientific Games had paid $1.5 billion for the company founded by Harry Williams seventy years previously.
WMS Gaming Slots
WMS Gaming slots are noted for their traditional aspects, as the company has not as yet developed the kind of immersive, 3D video slots as championed by companies such as Betsoft and NetEnt. If you enjoy accurate renderings of the kind of slots you might encounter at a Vegas casino, then you’ll love the games typically provided by WMS Gaming.
A great example of a WMS Gaming slot is Bier Haus. This slot has five reels, four rows and a possible forty pay lines. It is based around Oktoberfest in Bavaria, with the reels filled with Bavarian paraphernalia and buxom beauties serving lashings of golden beer.
Although WMS Gaming have created plenty of tie-in slots for their real-world customers, they prefer to keep such titles purely for real-world casinos. One of the tie-in titles they have released online though is Bruce Lee – Dragon’s Tale, which is a sequel to their previous release which was simply called Bruce Lee. This inventive slot has a main reels section and three further sets of 5×3 reels, giving you a rare chance to play more than one slot at once.
Other top WMS titles you should keep an eye out for include Crime Pays, Viking Vanguard, Amazon Queen, Black Knight (and Black Knight II) and Invaders from the Planet Moolah.
WMS Gaming Conclusion
WMS Gaming have a great deal of history to look back on, having been around and involved in the US gaming industry in one way or another since 1943. Harry Williams began his business by buying second-hand pinball machines, re-painting them and selling them on. The company finally hit the jackpot when it was sold to Scientific Games for the princely sum of $1.5 billion in 2013.
Although it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever win that much when playing a WMS Gaming slot, there’s always the possibility of winning a tidy sum of cash. Why not take one of the WMS Gaming slots mentioned above out for a quick spin?
