Let’s make one thing perfectly clear before we delve into this article, shall we – “Mega Moolah” is a bad slot. There, I said it. Its graphics are terrible, its premise is boring, it lacks any sort of substantial bonus game… And worst of all, it’s just not fun. I’m sorry, I know a lot of people love this slot, but there’s just not that much there to it! It’s a very safe, very cheap effort that just comes off as lazy, especially when compared to other “Microgaming” slots such as Thunderstruck II, Hellboy and Lord of the Rings. And yet people keep playing the damn thing! It’s by far one of the most popular slots in the world, to the point where even people who only have a tangential familiarity with slots have heard of the name “Mega Moolah”! How come such an objectively terrible slot machine be so highly regarded?!
Well… It’s because “Mega Moolah” has the world’s highest jackpot for a slot machine, and it has for a very long time – to the point where it actually holds the Guiness World Record for it. For those of you who don’t know, there are numerous types of jackpots in online slots – some are static and are always the same no matter when you play (for example, 5000 times your bet). You can play tomorrow, you can play next month or you can play in three years, and that jackpot is always going to be exactly the same so long as you bet the same amount of money. And then there’s the progressive jackpots, which accumulate over time and then reset back to a certain value every time they’re won. So today a slot might net you £500,000, but if somebody wins it tomorrow then the day after tomorrow the jackpot will only be, say, £10,000 until it accumulates back again.
“Mega Moolah” has a progressive jackpot, but not just any progressive jackpot. While most progressives reset to something fairly small and then build their way up from there, this one always, and I do mean always – no matter where in the world you are or in which casino you play – resets to at least a million when won. This leads to people inevitably winning absurd amounts of cash from it, ranging between £1.3m and the aforementioned £15m – lifechanging sums no matter how you look at it. And keep in mind, slots very rarely offer more than a million in general, let alone having that as the minimum amount that you can win! And to top it all off, there have been over 25 people who have won the “Mega Moolah” jackpot since the slot’s inception, and even though that’s a lot less than 0.1% of all the people who have played it, it’s still a lot more winners than most other slots have. So… From a certain point of view, maybe “Mega Moolah” isn’t a terrible slot after all. Maybe, under a certain light, it’s actually the greatest slot of them all.