Crazy Redux
Incredible Technologies revives the tried-and-true Crazy Money brand in a great new presentation
By Frank Legato
Fans of slot games by manufacturer Incredible Technologies have always been able to rely on one constant: The slot supplier responds to what they like, by returning to winning themes with sequels.
Crazy Money was IT’s first big hit, released shortly after the company—already a legend in the amusement game field—launched its first casino slots in 2010. Players went bonkers over the game’s “Money Catch” bonus feature, in which cash bills fly through the air on the touchscreen monitor and the player touches them to rack up bonus credits.
Two years after its original release, the first sequel came in Crazy Money Millionaire, and IT has periodically released new games in the family, each with its own unique features, and each reprising the Money Catch feature as part of the bonus package.
“We’ve had several iterations of it,” says Shawn Cassatt, IT’s director of product management. “Crazy Money Deluxe, on our original Skybox cabinet, is one of our best games of all time. The person who designed that game, Dan Whelan, is now our head of development.”
Whelan, IT’s vice president of gaming product development, also designed this year’s version of Crazy Money, which is one of the best in the series—not to mention one of the funniest.
Meet Crazy Money Break ‘N’ Bank.
Crazy Money Break ‘N’ Bank brings one of the most popular modern game features, the pot-filler bonus, to the legendary brand. The funny part is in the characters representing the player-selectable collection pots—they are golden piggy banks that also are caricatures of the two greatest U.S. presidents—George Washington, whose piggy version is called “Gorge Washington;” and Abraham Lincoln, aka “Baberaham Lincoln.”
“Gorge” has a wig and tri-cornered hat, and “Baberaham” sports a stovepipe hat and beard. You “pick your pig” at the beginning, and that character serves as the collection pot during primary-game play.
Familiar Feel, New Format
The primary game, a five-reel, 15-line format, reprises the look and feel of the original Crazy Money. The reel symbols are cash bills displaying cartoon Founding Fathers in various denominations, with matching bills falling on the payline adding up to jackpots totaling the face value of those bills—five $20 bills for 100 credits, for instance—multiplied by the line bet.
The game also features IT’s signature “AnglePays,” which award extra wins when angled cash symbols form diagonal lines.
The bonuses on this new version of the game, however, are enhanced by the cabinet on which the game sits, IT’s new Prism Skybox cabinet. It features twin 43-inch monitors—the bottom monitor curved—and the immersive presence of its predecessor, the Infinity Skybox.
“The Prism Skybox is our beautiful new 10-foot-tall cabinet with two large ultra-high-definition screens,” says Cassatt. “It provides a really immersive experience, with a lot of real estate to show the graphics and bonuses. It features immersive lighting that goes around the edges of those screens. It has a large 15.6-inch button panel, and it’s an ergonomic cabinet, delivering a really enjoyable playing session.”
IT’s game designers have used this new palette to display a compelling bit of animation using the “Sky Wheel,” a large wheel that grows to occupy both monitors when the bonus is triggered. Slices on the wheel include credit prizes and the four jackpots, with a “SuperSync Progressive,” resetting at $10,000, as the top prize.
The SuperSync Progressive was introduced by IT this year. It is a local-area progressive linking up to 100 IT games, spanning different game families. That means the top prize increments upward much more quickly than would be possible on a standalone progressive jackpot. The top prize is available at all bets.
During primary game play, Sky Wheel scatter symbols appear, interspersed with the cash symbols. Each time a scatter lands, it flies up to the piggy/pot at the top of the screen. The pig grows fatter in anticipation of it bursting to trigger the main Sky Wheel bonus. Alternatively, three or more Sky Wheel symbols landing on the screen during a single spin will trigger the bonus.
Once triggered, the Sky Wheel grows to its giant bonus form, in a great display across the expansive screens. The wheel slices include credit awards ranging from 960 to 9,600, the four jackpots—static awards of $96 (Mini, marked by George Washington), $480 (Minor, hosted by Lincoln) and $3,600 (Major, Thomas Jefferson’s prize); and the SuperSync Progressive, with Ben Franklin hosting the $10,000-plus jackpot—and four slices marked “Bonus.”
Landing one of the credit prizes triggers an inner wheel concentric to the big wheel, which spins to a multiplier amount to be applied to the credit award, or to a “respin” that spins the wheel again for a potentially larger award. Landing a Bonus slice on the wheel triggers the familiar Money Catch bonus. When that happens, the inner wheel displays slices indicating how many picks the player gets to grab bonus dollars by touching the flying bills on the screen—20, 30, 40, 50 or 100 picks.
The screen then switches to a scene of presidential statues, with bills of various denominations flying around the front of the screen. The player touches the bills to accumulate the bonus award from the various denominations. This feature can typically result in awards in the hundreds of dollars.
In this version of the game, there’s another twist to the Money Catch bonus. Randomly, the player’s chosen presidential pig character will pop on the screen. The player touches the piggy bank repeatedly until it bursts for an extra bonus award. (The pig oinks and grunts as you touch it, in another funny game feature.)
On top of the 10-foot display is the popular Big Win Leaderboard. This takes all wins of 100 times the bet or more—line wins, jackpots or bonus wins—and records them on an overhead display. There are no initials or names on the list, but players will be able to compare their wins with those on the list, and are notified on their game screens when their own wins reach the leaderboard. “It’s a nice little twist, and definitely ups the fun factor a little bit,” says Cassatt.
The Old and the New
In the end, Crazy Money Break ‘N’ Bank takes the best of the original game series and adds features that are popular with today’s players. “We wanted it to be true to the lineage of the Crazy Money brand, with its iconic Money Catch bonus, and put it on a new, beautiful cabinet with a few fun twists and bigger wins,” Cassatt says.
“Some of the things we’ve done to bring it forward and make it interesting and modern include making it a bit more volatile, because it was so much of an entertainment game originally. The Money Catch bonus looks amazing on the modern high-definition screens, and we’ve added some bigger wins.”
And of course, the new game has the presidential pigs, he adds. In addition to popping up to enrich the Money Catch feature, they appear during other parts of the game to help the player out. For instance, they can appear to nudge the Sky Wheel needle to get you into the bonus.
At press time, the game was placed in just under a dozen casinos, with more being installed every day. If you haven’t seen it yet, you likely will soon.
Cassatt says more enhancements may appear in the near future—notably, because of the rapidly incrementing SuperSync Progressive, the top jackpots may soon rise. “Players are going to get to see in the near future where they may walk up and find one of their favorite games like Crazy Money Break ‘N’ Bank with $50,000 or $100,000 starting value on those progressives,” he says, “because the jackpot can be linked between multiple game families.”
So far, the game is shaping up as IT’s next big hit.
“I’ve seen the staff at some of the casinos where we’ve installed it sit there and, without even putting money in, push the button to make the pig noises and switch back and forth between characters, just to play with the game,” Cassatt says. “It’s always nice to add a little bit more of a fun factor for our players.”
Imagine how much more fun it is with real money wagered.
Crazy Money Break ‘N’ Bank
Incredible Technologies
SLOT TYPE
Five-reel, 15-line video slot; pot-collection and second-screen bonus events; progressive wheel-spin bonus; .01, 02, .05, .10, .50 and 1.00 denominations
PAYBACK % RANGE
86%-94%
AVERAGE HIT FREQUENCY
Approximately 30%
TOP JACKPOT
Progressive; $10,000 reset
