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NextGen Games
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NextGen Gaming is a legacy provider of more than a hundred video slots and 3-reel slots under their name and licensed to others. It was one the most prolific producers of online slots at one time.
The company was launched in 1999 as Next Generation Entertainment (Aust) Pty Limited but quickly shortened the trade name to NextGen Gaming. It was founded by two former IGT (Australia) executives, - Tony McAuslan and Mario Castellari, who held a 49% share in the new company and took on 51% funding from a pair of other Australian businesses, one in media and the other a venture capital group.
As a business-to-business (B2B) supplier, most consumers were never familiar with the company’s scope and reach, but some games did come out and were promoted under the NextGen name. 300 Shields, Cash Stampede, and Medusa might be the best-known slots released under the NextGen brand name.
The company’s Australia studios continued to pump out games through mergers, acquisitions, and eventually, complete absorption into the gaming giant once known as SG Digital, a division of Scientific Games and now known as Light & Wonder (LNW), but let’s take this one step at a time to see how one of the most prolific game makers at one time quietly faded into the woodwork and why we can still play many of its games today.
NextGen merged with NYX Gaming Group in 2011, giving it further reach and the resources to grab hold of new markets. NextGen was licensed in the UK at the time. One of the main things the move accomplished for NextGen was gaining access to the NYX distribution network and NYX got NextGen’s expertise in game development and localization talent. Almost overnight a mostly unheard-of distributor and a quiet but prolific developer created an iGaming powerhouse.
The company gained industry attention, leading to its $630M acquisition by Scientific Games in 2017. Scientific Games shed its lottery division and rebranded as Light & Wonder in 2022, now it focuses on cross-platform gaming. NextGen Gaming merged into LNW under the NYX umbrella. LNW deals with 60 studios and about 6,000 games.
Other studios owned by Light & Wonder include Elk, Lightning Box, and Authentic Gaming.
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NextGen Slots
We count at least 120 NextGen slot titles online but that number is much higher depending on your idea of what makes a game, not to mention all the land-based games the Aussie studios put out that were never documented on the interactive website. Multiple companies distributed some of the most popular games under their own brands in various configurations for different markets. The best way to illustrate this would be to look at a once-popular game titled Doctor Love.
We’ll try to keep the Isaac begat Jacob’s to a minimum here. However, the game was licensed to Vegas Tech (formerly English Harbor before a merger with Odds On) and that version of the game survives online today under the Wager Gaming (WGS Technologies) brand. It has 20 paylines and the same rules and paytable as the 9-line version that was put out under the Cryptologic name.
Briefly, during the great mergers and acquisitions era another company came along and bought up everything it could get its hands on and then imploded horribly. Amaya bought Cryptologic and only a few pieces of the pioneering platform provider/payment processor remain active in the diaspora. The NextGen slots don’t seem to be among them.
The illustration of multiple versions of NextGen games being released under different names is repeated over and over again throughout the catalog. Cryptologic and Vegas Tech were just the most obvious of the examples and they were easy enough to spot simply because they used the same imagery and paytables, not to mention the same titles. PartyGaming laid claim to a few titles that others had in the past as well. A few of those games are still available in the WGS catalog.
Other NextGen partners back in the day (companies that most likely had slots created for them) included 888 Casino, Bally, Inspired, Octavian (Italian AWPs), Elixir (now known as Entertainment Gaming Asia a land slot vendor), and Reel Games (land slots).
The only thing that changed from one brand to the other (VegasTech > Cryptologic) was the number of paylines, and necessarily, the reel strip configurations to achieve similar maths with such dissimilar line counts. This was back in the day when online video slots all had virtual reel strips that could be documented. Those strips (length and and number of different symbols) aligned with the RTP, paytable, and volatility. To learn more about this aspect of slot machines, please see Deconstructing Cleopatra.
We’ll take a look at a few of the NextGen Gaming slots:
300 Shields
This is the most famous game to ever come out of the NextGen labs and studios. It was so popular that it spawned at least two variants: 300 Shields Extreme and 300 Shields Mighty Ways. It’s such an insanely profitable game on a good spin that many online casinos with no maximum cashout provisions on their bonuses forbid its play with bonus funds,
Spartans come to life in the high-volatility slot with 5 reels, 25 paylines, and massive payout potential. The big money can be found in the free spins bonus, where multipliers can reach an incredible 300x, amplifying base game payouts by up to 300 times.
The Warrior symbol acts as the Wild, substituting for all symbols except the Scatter Shield. When it completes a winning payline, the golden-armored soldier swings his sword and delivers a fierce battle cry.
Scatter Shields trigger the Free Spins bonus round. Land three or more Scatters to unlock 5 free spins with all Warrior wins doubled. Collect 2 or more Shields during the feature to be awarded 5 more spins with a 5x multiplier. Gather up 6 Shields to earn another 5 spins and boost Warrior wins to a 25x multiplier. For the ultimate in thrills collect 12 Shields during the bonus round to unlock 5 more spins with jaw-dropping 300x multipliers on each one of them that has a Warrior on the winning line.
300 Shields Extreme
This is essentially the same game as the original but the graphics might be more high-definition and there is a bonus buy feature (Buy Pass). To jump right into the free games simply stake 60x your regular bet (15.00 to 750.00). You’ll still need to collect at least 2 shields on your first try (5 spins) and up to four more (a total of 6) on the next round to get to the 25x multipliers and then up to six more (a total of 12) to reach the 300x multiplier round (2, 4, 6). You will make it to the 5x multiplier on most tries and the 25x multiplier about half as often on average.
The saving grace is that even if you collect 2 Shields on your very first free spin, any additional collections will still build on the meter making it that much easier to reach your next goal. But of course, there’s no guarantee that once you reach the 300x multiplier round you won’t have five blank or low-paying spins in a row, that’s the nature of random and high volatility.
300 Shields Mighty Ways
This is an entirely different game mechanically from the first two but it retains the core graphic theme and shield collection progression in the free games and it still ends up with 300x multipliers if you reach the bonus pinnacle. It was released in late 2022, about 11 years after the NextGen/NYX merger and half a decade since Scientific Games acquired the entity, but it’s still 300 Shields even if LNW doesn’t give NextGen credit on the splash screen. However, there’s no way to know if any of the original 300 Shields talent worked on the Mighty Ways version.
This game starts as a 6x3 cascading slot with 729 ways to win. After a winning combination is paid those symbols are removed and new ones drop in after one more position is added to the reels that held winning symbols This can continue until there are 262,144 ways to win across the six reels. Three or more matching symbols on adjacent reels starting with the leftmost reel form a winning combination. The number of ways to win each spin is displayed above the reelset at all times and naturally grows with every subsequent winning combination. A blank spin will reset the reels to 3 positions each and display 729 Ways.
Free spins are triggered naturally about every 150 spins on average. However, you can bypass the waiting game with a bonus buy in this game too. There are two Buy Pass options; Free Games for 50x your stake or Super Free Games for 1,566x your stake. That means a regular $1 spin will hit your bankroll for $1,566 if you want to see all six Shields land and go for the gusto with 5 games at 300x multipliers and a chance to pick up new sets of five free games each - or you can spend $50 to land 3, 4, or 5 scatters for 5, 7, or 10 free games and progress through the free spins multipliers as above at 5x, 25x, and finally 300x.
Dr. Love
This colorful slot was launched in 2011. It’s a 5-reel, 20-pay line game that represents many of NextGen’s games mechanically and in the maths but it also shows a bit of the lightheartedness that made the games so approachable - while you could win or lose, the games didn’t seem to take themselves too seriously.
Dr. Love is an icon in the game that acts as a Wild symbol, stepping in for all other symbols except the Scattered Love Meters. Scatters trigger free spins and we’ll get to those soon.
The Doctor is the game’s most valuable symbol. Five on a payline award 5,000 coins. At the other end of the paytable, the Stethoscope and Medication symbols offer low payouts of up to 100 coins. Winning spins are celebrated with a bubbling up of pink scalloped hearts and a bit of other animation and sound.
The game is highly similar to others in terms of maths including the RTP at just a hair over 95%. Landing three scatters will trigger 10 free games; four will award 15, and hitting all five will activate 20 free spins. All wins are paid 3x in free games and spins can be triggered an unlimited number of times.
If you like retro games, this one might be for you. It was popular enough in its time that NextGen released a follow-up, Doctor Love on Vacation.
Doctor Love on Vacation
This game is a lot like its predecessor and has the same three main characters; the Doctor, his Nurse, and the Patient. The lower paying symbols have been replaced with fun-in-the-sun vacation symbols and everybody has a suntan.
The iconography is not the only different thing. The paytable awards differently and the wild symbol doubles wins during the base game. The RTP is slightly lower but it’s still above 95%.
Free games are triggered by three or more scatters but the spins are awarded at the rate of four spins for each triggering scatter so you can start with 12, 16, or 20 initial spins and unlimited retriggers at the same award levels.
Other Slots in a Series, Branded Slots
NextGen would often capitalize on a game’s popularity by creating a sort of franchise out of it. Sometimes though, it seemed like they would also try out a new mechanic and simply choose a fairly popular game to run a balloon up with. Whatever the reasons, they made several slots in a series. Some of these included Medusa, Medusa 2, Medusa 2 Jackpots, and Medusa Megaways, as well as Merlin's Millions, Merlin Magic Respins, and Merlin's Money Burst. Of course, some of these titles were revisited long after NextGen was folded into what is now Light & Wonder.
The company also worked with intellectual property managers to produce games like DC Comics’ Justice League, Batman, Flash, and Green Lantern as well as Andre the Giant from professional wrestling fame and his role in Princess Bride and Great Britain’s Judge Dredd.
Conclusion
It’s not uncommon nowadays to see a new developer hit the scene with a portfolio of around 100 slots - they are simply easier to make these days from highly developed game engines to HTML5 delivery not to mention the very real possibility that any of half a dozen AI transformers out there could re-invent the wheel from the inside out so to speak. These games came from a time when every step mattered and the games were easy to understand.
The vast majority of NextGen titles were nothing special by today’s standards, but they were something unique and exciting in their time. Almost more important is the realization that NextGen was the first truly independent development studio that didn’t work exclusively for one machine manufacturer or software provider. Recall, in 2000 if you played at a Microgaming casino you played Microgaming slots and nothing else - if you wanted Playtech, that’s all there was on the shelf at the virtual Playtech slot shop.
If you want to play the legacy games in their purest form today you might need to explore online casinos powered by Wager Gaming. Otherwise, knowing a few titles and looking for those games at sites that are served by LNW might be a good bet. You can find a site with free versions that should be able to link you to real money play too.