On 24 February 1982, an engineer named Inge S. Telnaes filed a patent that changed what a reel machine could do. It was granted on 15 May 1984 as US Patent 4,448,419, and the wording in the document itself is what makes it worth reading. Telnaes described assigning numbers to reel stopping positions, with each number entered one or more times, “thereby enabling any odds to be set without changing the physical characteristics of the machine”.
In this article, we’ll walk through the physical limit that made such a patent necessary, then look at what a split symbol is doing when it divides on screen, then do the multiplication behind those enormous ways-to-win figures so you can check one yourself. If you’ve ever had the back panel off a cabinet and traced why a machine behaves the way it does, this is the same exercise applied to a reel. And if you want somewhere to test the theory while you read, a New Zealand catalogue like vegastars nz lets you open a paytable, count the symbols on each reel and see the arithmetic play out on titles you already recognise.
Steel Has a Hard Ceiling
Old reel machines had a problem you can hold in your hands. The number of possible outcomes was tied directly to the drums, so more symbols meant a bigger reel, and a bigger reel meant a bigger cabinet.
Historian Cristina Turdean documented this in her Hagley Program research on the digitisation of the slot machine covering 1960 to 1985. Her finding is specific: odds and payback combinations depended on reel size and symbol count, and “the more and bigger the reels, the higher the odds and payback combinations could be, but this interdependence had negative psychological effects on players, who perceived bulky machines as being less good”.
Read that again, because it’s an odd and rather brilliant constraint. Players judged oversized machines as poorer quality. So the one obvious route to more combinations was blocked by taste rather than by engineering.
Money closed the door further. Figures from economic historian Mirko Ernkvist, cited in the same body of research, record an IGT machine selling for USD 12,000 in 1980 and USD 7,500 in 1982. Operators buying at those prices weren’t going to order larger, costlier boxes to chase a few more symbol positions.
You’ll notice we haven’t given you stop-counts for specific named cabinets. We couldn’t verify those to a primary source, so we’re leaving them out rather than guessing at a number that sounds authoritative.
What we can say is that the pressure had nowhere to go except inward, into logic. That tension between physical structure and design ambition is still visible today. Scroll the modern New Zealand library at Vegastars, where straightforward five-reel classics sit alongside tumbling-reel and scatter-pay formats across a catalogue of more than 5,000 pokies, and you’re looking at generations of the same problem, solved different ways.
How One Position Learns to Count Twice
A split symbol doesn’t add a row. It doesn’t add a column. It changes how a position is counted when the payout gets worked out.
The trade outlet PASA made this point clearly in a March 2025 explainer, dating splitting symbols as elements that appeared in online releases between 2020 and 2021, and noting that splitting “does not mean an additional row or column; rather, it refers to the process during payout calculations”.
If you’ve built a MAME cabinet or configured a Pi setup, you already know this shape of idea. There’s a layer sitting between the thing you physically touch and the thing the system counts. A control panel has a fixed number of buttons; the software underneath can map far more logical inputs than the panel has holes. Split symbols work on that principle, applied to a reel position rather than a joystick.
The screen shows one cell. The calculation treats it as two, three or four.
What’s satisfying about the mechanic is how well it scales in both directions:
- Splitting affects payout calculation rather than grid size
- It emerged as a named online feature between 2020 and 2021
- It works on a grid as small as 3×3 with only five win lines, as in G Games’ Cheeky Fruits Split, where a SPLIT symbol divides reel symbols into up to four of the same type
- Retro-styled versions came earlier, with NetEnt’s Hit 2 Split launching in 2014 on a deliberately old-fashioned fruit machine design, respinning and splitting winning fruit to allow ten-of-a-kind results, the strawberry paying 200x bet at the top of the table
The fruit machine look and the split calculation were paired long before anyone described splitting as a new feature. The name is recent; the maths behind it isn’t.
Studios interpret it very differently, which is easy to see when they’re side by side. Vegastars carries titles like Mighty Symbols: Jokers and 1 Reel Irish Wonders alongside games from Pragmatic Play, Play’n GO, NetEnt, Push Gaming, Hacksaw Gaming and BGaming, so you can compare how two developers handle the same idea on similar grids.
The Multiplication Nobody Shows You
Those huge ways-to-win numbers come from a sum you can do on the back of an envelope.
The total is simply the symbol counts on each reel multiplied together. With six reels each showing between two and seven symbols, iGamingWheel puts the maximum at 7^6, which is 117,649, the minimum at 2^6, or 64, with most spins landing somewhere between roughly 1,000 and 30,000 ways.
Try a real one. Reels showing 3, 5, 2, 6, 4 and 7 symbols give you 3 × 5 × 2 × 6 × 4 × 7, which comes to 5,040 ways, an example worked through by iGaming Payment Processing. Set that against the older benchmark of a standard five-by-three video layout, which GamingSoft puts at 243 ways to win.
Here’s how the design stages line up:
More ways to win describes a different spread of outcomes, usually more frequent smaller hits. It doesn’t mean better value, and any game’s return figures sit separately from its win-position count.
So when did you last check whether a game’s headline number came from more symbols, or from a different way of counting the same ones?
Doing that check needs published information, which is why it helps when volatility ratings sit in the game rules and titles are independently RNG certified before going live, as Vegastars notes for its catalogue.
Why Kiwi Readers Are Closer to This Than They Think
New Zealand builds game design rather than watching it from a distance, and at a scale that has surprised even the people forecasting it.
The NZGDA 2025 annual survey recorded industry pre-tax income of NZD 759.57 million for 2024/25, up 38.6% on the previous year, with full-time equivalent roles rising 29.2% from 1,097 to 1,418, and 95% of revenue, around NZD 709 million, earned from international sales. The sector then crossed NZD 1 billion for the year to March 2026, arriving two years ahead of NZGDA’s own 2028 projection, as GamesIndustry.biz reported.
On that milestone, Joy Keene, executive director of the New Zealand Game Developers Association, pointed out that the billion-dollar figure “includes at least $200m from new games”.
Growth is spread widely rather than concentrated. GamesIndustry.biz found combined revenue across 43 rebate-supported studios up 17% to $829 million in 2025/26, with games in development climbing from 170 to 194. Kiwis are playing plenty too; IGEA put total New Zealand consumer spending on video games at NZ$649 million in 2025, a 9% rise, including NZ$267 million on digital and NZ$246.9 million on mobile.
Design literacy travels with all that activity. A country exporting almost all of its game revenue is full of people who look at a mechanic and ask what it’s doing underneath, which is the exact habit worth bringing to a paytable.
If you want to run that comparison yourself, Vegastars adds new pokies weekly from licensed studios, groups distinctive mechanics together, accepts NZD deposits and keeps live chat open around the clock, which makes checking two studios’ approaches to splitting a single-session job.
Software Solved What Steel Could Not
Trace the line back to 1982 and something consistent appears. Every real expansion in reel design came from changing what the machine counts, not what it physically contains. Splitting is that instinct applied to one position on a reel, which is why it works equally well on a nine-cell grid and a six-reel monster.
Anyone who restores machines knows the good engineering tends to be found where a constraint refused to move.
The vocabulary is converging, too. IGT’s Split ‘N’ Win Link Cats, released in 2024, brings a Hold and Split respin sequence into a physical cabinet, where split symbols divide symbols already locked in place. Treat that as illustrative colour rather than hard data, since it comes from a release description rather than a trade report.
Read the paytable, count the symbols per reel, multiply, and you’ll understand what a game is doing before you’ve spent a cent.
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