Game Art & Visuals · Updated 16 October 2026
“After playing, check your wallet.” It sounds like something a nana says at the door of the RSA. It is the last line of a laboratory study about the sound of pokies.
In 2013 Mike Dixon, a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, sat 96 gamblers at a simulated slot machine and tracked their skin conductance and heart rate. Each saw 28 real wins and 28 spins that paid back less than the bet while the speakers celebrated.
They played once with sound and once in silence, then said how many spins had beaten the stake. The true number was 28. Players guessed high both times, and the error grew with sound, 24 percent against 15. Dixon’s advice closes the university’s release of 12 July 2013.
The credit meter had told the truth. The speakers had not.
That gap between what a cabinet pays and what it sounds like runs through its whole design history. Even the nickname is Australian shorthand for poker machine, first recorded in print in 1964. New Zealand legalised the cabinets in clubs and hotels in 1988.
Below: how the look and sound were built, how New Zealand law reached inside the box, and what officials counted in June 2026. No play advice. This is the history of an object.
Why are they called pokies?
Because the first coin machines that caught on in American bars dealt poker hands. The best-known early design, credited to Sittman and Pitt of Brooklyn in 1893, held five drums carrying 50 card faces. You dropped in a nickel, pulled a lever and hoped for a good hand.
There was no payout chute. The bar paid the prize, so a pair of kings might earn a beer. To tilt the odds, operators commonly pulled two cards, the ten of spades and the jack of hearts, which doubled the odds against a royal flush.
Australians then did what Australians do to long words. The Australian National Dictionary says the plural nickname is first recorded in 1964. Its earliest quotation is from I. Hamilton’s 1965 novel Persecutor: “I always know how much I lose on the pokies.”
The first sentence the dictionary can find about the word is a sentence about losing.
Some gambling sites say the name comes from poking buttons. We found no source for that, and the dictionary ties the word to poker, so we would drop the button theory.
From five drums to three reels
Poker had a design problem. To pay out by itself, a cabinet must read its own result, and a five-card hand has too many winners for springs and levers. Charles Fey, who had been building coin-operated devices in San Francisco for nearly a decade, solved it by throwing most of the deck away.
His Liberty Bell, dated to 1898 by the SFO Museum, had three reels of ten stops, 1,000 combinations. Most histories list five symbols: horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts and a bell. Three bells paid ten nickels. Other accounts date the design anywhere from 1887 to 1895.
Look at that symbol list again. Three of the five are card suits. Poker survived on the reels as decoration, a leftover from a game the device no longer played.
When did the lever stop mattering?
Australia built its own industry inside the clubs. Len Ainsworth founded Aristocrat in Sydney in 1953, making cabinets at a factory in Rosebery while they were still illegal in New South Wales but tolerated in returned servicemen’s clubs. The state then legalised them for licensed clubs in an Act assented on 19 September 1956.
Museums Victoria holds one early result, an Aristocrat Clubmaster Gold Award Super Jackpot made between about 1955 and 1960 and used in New South Wales leagues clubs. Its name runs across the front like a shop sign.
In the United States, Bally’s Money Honey of 1963 went electromechanical, with a hopper that could pay up to 500 coins without an attendant. The side lever, the arm in “one-armed bandit”, became a gesture rather than a mechanism.
Then the reels left the box altogether. Fortune Coin’s 1976 video slot drew them on a modified 19-inch Sony Trinitron colour set and was trialled at the Las Vegas Hilton. The bonus round on a second screen appeared in Australia by 1994, in a game called Three Bags Full.
| Year | Change | What it did to look or sound |
|---|---|---|
| 1893 | Sittman and Pitt drums, Brooklyn | Card faces on drums, prizes paid by the bar |
| 1898 | Fey’s Liberty Bell, San Francisco | Three reels, five symbols, automatic payout |
| 1956 | New South Wales legalises club cabinets | Local designs such as the Clubmaster |
| 1963 | Bally Money Honey | Electric hopper, lever becomes ornament |
| 1976 | Fortune Coin video slot | Reels drawn on a colour screen |
| 1984 | Telnaes patent granted | Odds held in a hidden number table |
| 1994 | Three Bags Full, Australia | Second-screen bonus round |
| 2009 | New Zealand display rule covers all class 4 cabinets | Time, spend and net result on request |
How does a modern cabinet decide?
Once reels became pictures, the odds needed a new home. Inge Telnaes, a Norwegian mathematician, filed a patent on 24 February 1982, granted on 15 May 1984 as US 4,448,419. A random number generator chooses where each reel stops, and every stop is given one or more numbers.
A stop holding more numbers lands more often. So the strip you see and the odds you face come apart, and the designer can tune payouts without touching the artwork.
The patent is frank about why. Its background describes a device “perceived to present greater chances of payoff than it actually has”. We think that clause explains more about cabinet design than any cabinet does.
New Zealand rules pull part of that hidden table back into view. Regulation 7 of the 2004 harm minimisation rules requires class 4 cabinets to offer information on request, including the odds of the top and bottom five winning combinations and the average payout.
The reels on the screen are a drawing of the result. The odds live in a table nobody in the pub can see.Art Murmurs
Why do they sound like that?
A modern multiline game can return less than the bet and still celebrate. Researchers call these losses disguised as wins: the credit counter ticks up, the balance goes down, and the win sound and lights play anyway. Dixon’s 2013 experiment was built to isolate exactly that cue.
Near misses work on a different nerve: two top symbols on the line, the third just off it. In 1986 the Exeter psychologist R. L. Reid reported that 18 of 20 slot players he spoke with believed a near miss encourages more play.
Dixon’s group later tested the body’s answer. In a 2011 study of 65 players, near misses produced larger skin conductance responses than wins or losses, and a deeper slowing of the heart.
The authors read it as frustration, the physical feeling of almost. The same paper notes that Ontario’s rules let near-miss symbols sit beside the payline up to 12 times more often than chance would put them there.
These are laboratory simulators in Canada, not New Zealand pubs. We found no published New Zealand limit on near-miss frequency, and that matters: it is a lever a player can neither see nor switch off.
When did the machines arrive in New Zealand pubs?
In 1988, according to Te Ara, when the government legalised electronic gaming machines in clubs and hotels, and from 1994 in casinos. Some summaries say 1987, and we could not open the amending statute itself.
Cabinets outside casinos are owned by corporate societies, usually called trusts, and hosted in pubs and clubs. Since 2 September 2016 a society must return an amount equal to at least 40 percent of its GST-exclusive gross proceeds to authorised community purposes each year.
Growth was fast. The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) counted 7,770 machines in June 1994 and 25,221 in June 2003, the peak. Three months later, on 18 September 2003, the Gambling Act received royal assent.
The Act made cabinets outside casinos class 4 gambling, with purposes that include limiting growth and minimising harm. It also capped venue sizes. A venue licensed on 17 October 2001 may keep up to 18, and one licensed between that date and the Act’s commencement up to nine.
What the rules changed inside the cabinet
For a century the cabinet had grown louder and brighter. From 1 October 2005 every new class 4 unit, and from 1 July 2009 every one in service, had to offer a player information display showing session length, money spent and the net win or loss.
Regulation 8 goes further. Play must pause at irregular intervals, never more than 30 minutes apart, and show time, spend and result before asking whether to continue.
In 2022 the government reopened the rules, and the consultation drew 1,322 submissions. When the changes were announced, the minister responsible put it bluntly.
“Known to be the most harmful form of land-based gambling in Aotearoa.”Jan Tinetti, Minister of Internal Affairs, quoted by 1News, 18 November 2022
That is a minister describing a product her own department regulates. Amending regulations followed on 24 July 2023, and on 1 December 2023 two design rules arrived: cabinets in the gambling area must not be visible from outside, and any ATM must sit in view of the main bar.
After 125 years of cabinets built to be seen, the law asked for ones hidden from the footpath.
What the numbers look like in 2026
- Class 4 cabinets, 30 June 202613,613
- Venues948
- Player losses, April to June 2026$271.5m
- Player losses, year to June 2026$1,051.2m
- Peak count, June 200325,221
We read the DIA dashboard for the April to June 2026 quarter on 16 October 2026. It lists 13,613 cabinets in 948 venues, down 48 and three since March. Players lost $271.5 million in the quarter, the highest June quarter in nominal dollars since the series began in 2015.
Adjusted for inflation, it was the third lowest June quarter on record. Both are true, and which one a story leads with tells you who wrote it.
Our own sum: the 12 months to June 2026 came to $1,051.2 million. Across 13,613 cabinets, that is about $77,200 each, or roughly $212 a day. The fleet is 46 percent smaller than at the 2003 peak. That is the wallet Dixon meant, multiplied by a fleet.
Geography sharpens it. In the June quarter the average cabinet in Porirua City took $26,848.25, more than three times the $8,332.10 in Mackenzie District. In 2023/24 class 4 accounted for $1,037 million of the $2,792 million lost across the four main forms of gambling.
The harm figures point the same way. The Problem Gambling Foundation says non-casino machines account for almost 51 percent of people seeking help. Citing the 2020 Health and Lifestyles Survey, Te Ao Māori News reported that about one in ten New Zealanders play, and one in five of them is at risk.
So the count is falling and the money is not. The next question is whether counting cabinets is still the right measure, or whether rules should follow what the research points at: the sound, the near miss, the pace.
Why are they called pokies?
Australians clipped the name of the coin devices that dealt poker hands on drums in American bars. The Australian National Dictionary first records the nickname in 1964.
How do pokies work?
A random number generator picks where each drawn reel stops, using a weighting table the player never sees. In New Zealand the game must show odds information and your session spending on request.
When were pokie machines legalised in New Zealand?
Te Ara dates it to 1988 for clubs and hotels and 1994 for casinos. Since 2003 those outside casinos fall under the Gambling Act as class 4 gambling.
Is a poker machine the same as a slot machine?
In practice, yes. Americans say slot machine, Australians and New Zealanders say pokie, and New Zealand law says gaming machine.
Where does the money go?
A class 4 trust must return at least 40 percent of its GST-exclusive proceeds to community purposes each year.
Dixon’s advice was five words long. In a New Zealand pub the cabinet must now give it for him. At least every half hour the reels stop, the screen shows your time, your spend and where you stand, and it asks one question. Continue?
- The king of hearts: the court cards from the first poker drums.
- Casinos in New Zealand: the buildings, city by city.
Where the data comes from: counts and losses are from the Department of Internal Affairs (historical series; GMP dashboard for April to June 2026, read 16 October 2026). Law is from the Gambling Act 2003 and its regulations. Research is from the University of Waterloo and R. L. Reid (1986). Sittman and Pitt, Money Honey, Fortune Coin and Three Bags Full are from Wikipedia’s referenced history; we could not open primary sources. Mike Dixon’s age is not public. Per-cabinet figures are our calculation.