A 1963 Bally reel machine now sits under glass in the V&A Museum’s gaming archive, lit like a piece of jewelry rather than junked hardware. Ten years earlier that same cabinet would likely have gone straight to a scrapyard for parts. Something shifted in between: the slot machine, once written off as a cheap arcade box, gets studied today by industrial designers the way a mid-century chair or a rotary phone gets studied, a small artifact that quietly rewired how a hand meets a machine.
The shift is visible on live platforms too, where cabinet art and interface design get almost as much attention as payout math. A regular at casino sankra told me she picks games by the reel artwork before she ever checks the paytable, which is exactly the instinct designers are now chasing on purpose.
From Function to Form
The earliest slot machines, Charles Fey’s Liberty Bell among them, were pure mechanism: springs, gears, a lever. Nobody drew them so much as engineered them. Any flourish got added afterward, screwed onto a shell whose shape the internal gearwork had already dictated.
By the 1970s that order flipped. Manufacturers like Bally started sketching the cabinet first and fitting the electronics around the silhouette. A 1976 Bally internal memo, now archived at the Nevada State Museum, instructs engineers to “protect the curve” of a new cabinet even if it meant relocating the coin hopper. The relationship had reversed itself, and within roughly a decade nearly every major manufacturer worked the same way. Restorers who still work on those cabinets note that the wiring inside looks cramped compared with earlier models, evidence that the shell was locked in first and the electronics were squeezed into whatever space remained, a small but telling reversal of the original engineering logic.
Designers Behind the Reels
Once the reel became a screen instead of a printed strip, an entirely new hiring pool opened up for manufacturers. That single swap pulled in people who had never set foot on a casino floor: motion graphics artists, typographers, even a former Pixar lighting technician who spent three years at IGT tuning how gold coins catch virtual light.
Studios now credit named art directors the way film credits a cinematographer. One Malta-based studio lists a six-person visual team on its 2025 releases, up from a single freelance illustrator in 2015, and its hiring notices now specifically ask for a portfolio in motion design rather than general graphic art. The reel is no longer decoration wrapped around a random number generator; it is the first thing a player evaluates, often within four seconds of the game loading, well before any paytable gets a second look.
What Is on Display Now
Galleries have noticed. Berlin’s Museum für Kommunikation ran a six-week exhibit in 2024 pairing early mechanical cabinets with modern LED units, drawing 40,000 visitors, more than the museum’s average temporary show. Curators framed the machines not as gambling artifacts but as case studies in tactile interface design, the same lineage as arcade cabinets and early ATMs.
| Era | Defining material | Primary design goal |
| Mechanical (1900s-1960s) | Cast iron, walnut trim | Ruggedness, resistance to tampering |
| Electromechanical (1960s-1980s) | Steel, chrome trim | Reliability, sound feedback |
| Video (1990s-2000s) | Molded plastic, CRT glass | Screen visibility, ergonomics |
| Digital/artistic (2010s-present) | Aluminum, OLED panels | Emotional response, brand identity |
Materials That Changed Everything
Cast iron gave way to lighter alloys once cabinets needed to travel between venues rather than sit bolted to a casino floor for decades.
- Walnut and mahogany veneers, once standard, now appear mostly in retro reissues aimed at collectors.
- Chrome trim from the electromechanical era survives mainly as a styling reference on new units, not a functional part.
- OLED panels, thinner and cooler-running than CRT glass, let today’s cabinets stay slim enough for online interfaces to mimic on a phone screen.
Each material swap traces back to a practical constraint, yet each one also rewrote what a slot machine was allowed to look like.
Where You Can See Them
Beyond Berlin and London, the American Coin-Op Collectors Association runs a rotating exhibit that toured four US cities in 2025, and a private collection in Reno opens its doors twice a year by appointment, usually drawing a few hundred visitors per weekend. None of these charge more than a modest entry fee, and most pair the machines with short interviews from the designers who built them, which turns out to be the part visitors remember longest, more than the machines themselves.
What started as an engineering afterthought is now a documented design discipline, with its own materials history, its own named practitioners, and its own place on a museum wall.
