Fruit Machine Chat

Well, I think we all agree that they've never made 'the best' machines - but has anyone ever actually seen any of these:

Click here for Empire site!

:

I'm struggling to think of an Empire machine that I've enjoyed (apologies to any Empire 'people' reading!) - There was a cannoball themed game with three stacks which would often pay £75 / £100 off the top on £25 but sometimes wouldn't give a board for £30!

this is in crystal rooms but im sure its a 70.
played well when i was there.
the casg strike thingys are fadt cash so 4 strikes = 4 x fast cash

Ive seen a few of them. I have a test pub nearby which has had a few of them in. Emptied a few reservoir frogs as well but they are very old now though.

Empire are a small company that started up in the late 90's when a few guys from MDM who used to do machines for them left and set up on their own.

MDM weren't happy and refused to distribute their machines!

They've done some good games over the years; Haunted House was always a favourite of mine, and Korma Chameleon was a good game too - not massive earners for the player necessarily but charming in their own way. Big Cash Machine was a skill-laden game that I used to do well out of however.

Recently they've had a good run with Lo-tech games like Clockwork Oranges and the subsequent reglasses. In the current climate they're doing well to still be in business, considering some of the bigger companies that had gone to the wall.


I worked there for 9 months a few years back. Good bunch of guys!

The bigger companies never went to the wall, they just got swallowed up in takeovers

toothless11 wrote:Ive seen a few of them. I have a test pub nearby which has had a few of them in. Emptied a few reservoir frogs as well but they are very old now though.

I have recently had a £70 Resevoir Frog turn up. Was this ever chipped.
Never seen or heard of it before.
PM

surely can't be same machine on 70,it must be 9 or 10 years old maybe more.i have one on fiver jp close to me ,only trick i know on it is that the fourth feature up 'rise and fall' is jackpot if you hit zero. Surely the empty is nothing to do with this? Would'nt mind knowing it though,p.m appreciated.

Lugs: I think it is to do with that feature - although if I recall, tediously difficult to hit. There's an £8 version near me that might be worth a punt?!

Mystery_Plum wrote:Empire are a small company that started up in the late 90's when a few guys from MDM who used to do machines for them left and set up on their own.

MDM weren't happy and refused to distribute their machines!

They've done some good games over the years]I worked there for 9 months a few years back. Good bunch of guys! [/size]

The Gambler, Ghost Train and Pinball Nudger were good games aswell. On The Gambler where the jackpot paid tokens, you would never lose on a 7. Not sure if Bank Raid and Big Apple were also Empire Games.

bankraid and big apple were mdm mate.the gambler was one of my old faves on both ten pound and fiver jackies ,never saw one on tokes though.did very well on the tenner one back in the day.

Matt Vinyl wrote:Lugs: I think it is to do with that feature - although if I recall, tediously difficult to hit. There's an £8 version near me that might be worth a punt?!

The Rise and Fall trick only worked on 10p play/£5 jackpot, it wasn't put in on the other stakes and prizes, not even 5p play/£5 jackpot.

I don't know whether they took it out on the newer ones in the taller cabinet - the machine coped perfectly well with the trick during autoruns, even when hitting it every time, and it only went down to £0.00 30% of the time...

logopolis wrote:The Gambler, Ghost Train and Pinball Nudger were good games aswell. On The Gambler where the jackpot paid tokens, you would never lose on a 7. Not sure if Bank Raid and Big Apple were also Empire Games.

Ah yes that takes me back - I remember the £4 all cash ones were the same, but when they went to £5 they took it out.

Ghost Train was their first ever game; the profile was very similar to Colossus and Big Apple which were 2 of the last games they did at MDM.

they had a few games in the same kind of style as the gambler, i quite liked high spirits . all the mugs would take the second feature up ,it was called slammer

pinball nudger was the one where you had to hold the melons close and build the trail upto the skill square at the same time ,when it was going the skill used to go all the way up the nudge trail iirc. hold on melons was nice.

haunted house was without doubt one of their finest i loved the 10 pound one,we still have one(on cat d) now that takes a fortune,the kids love it and loads of them can nail the reel ghoulette .we have it on 88% and it is one of the best machines for repeat potential in our little boys section,spose there's only really globals 'classic spotted dick' that beats it for repeats where we are.

return to haunted house is poo though and i hope you were nothing to do with it Steve, and also nothing to do with 'a fish called wonga'

Theres an old Empire machine called Apache that i managed to empty years ago with a plain old refill key, basically you scrolled through the menu untill you got to 1 pnd rel (which obviously means 1 pound release) and press start for a hopper dump, it even had 10p rel, i emptied it after f*cking about with it the day it came in, after telling the staff it was empty they came out and filled it with £70 again which i had soon as they left, my one and only brief bit of tooling ops:



I heard there was one of these at Luton airport but never got round to trying it? maybe it worked on them all?

mr lugsy wrote:they had a few games in the same kind of style as the gambler, i quite liked high spirits . all the mugs would take the second feature up ,it was called slammer

pinball nudger was the one where you had to hold the melons close and build the trail upto the skill square at the same time ,when it was going the skill used to go all the way up the nudge trail iirc. hold on melons was nice.

haunted house was without doubt one of their finest i loved the 10 pound one,we still have one(on cat d) now that takes a fortune,the kids love it and loads of them can nail the reel ghoulette .we have it on 88% and it is one of the best machines for repeat potential in our little boys section,spose there's only really globals 'classic spotted dick' that beats it for repeats where we are.

return to haunted house is poo though and i hope you were nothing to do with it Steve, and also nothing to do with 'a fish called wonga'

Have you ever noticed that on a lot of their games when you get a nudge gamble in normal play, if the start button is flashing quickly it means the gamble will win, when it blinks slowly it will lose. Didn't know that until I started working there!

I had nothing to do with those two you mention, although Fish was underway when I left. Frogs was underway when I joined and I helped finish it off. It was my idea to add the Rise and Fall cheat ( ), the reason being that at the time in one of the main test sites, QPS Mr Money was taking shit-loads because of the 'Big Numbers' trick - all the local chav wannabe-pros were lumping it 24/7 thinking they had an edge (it had already been chipped for big Money-Belts), so we decided to add a small flava to the game and see if we could create a 'buzz' about the game. The programmer added a beep and some garbled rubbish on the alpha after you'd hit 0.00 to make it look like the machine had fucked up. Of course we put a safety-net or two in - the jackpot could never repeat for example - and I went down to the site and nailed a couple in front of the locals without making any effort to conceal what I was doing, and that was that

Korma Chameleon was probably the best game we did while I was there. Most games before it used pretty much the same base code and profile which players were starting to learn, so we changed the profile quite a lot for that game, gave plenty of boards and saved money into a pot and dumped it off a streak triggered from the trail bonus. You'd hit boost or something and it would go past 8 steps and light up the name, then the streak would start. You never knew when you'd get this as it was separate from the rest of the game. I added a small flava too (borrowed from Barcrest's Revolution etc) whereby if you stepped to a 2 or 11 you couldn't lose if you went the right way - useful for getting nearer the top. It was a good machine and got played a lot because all types of player got a decent game from it. The order of the numbers on the number belt was a bastard to work out though! It must have been a good game because they skinned it at least twice - Tomb Raiders and some dart game - and they rarely did any reglasses back then.