A simple game model

… Slingo … A combination of slot machines and Bingo was designed and implemented as an on- line game, under the name of Slingo. The game was modeled on an old Mexican five- wheel slot machine, but modified during development to build in features that were best done in software.

games are played with ten participants per game, and a “chat” feature was added so that during the game the players could tease or congratulate each other.

The chat feature was a big hit, so much so that players developed a distinctive vocabulary that became known as “Slingo Lingo”, thus presaging by years a similar phenomenon amongst cell phone instant messaging systems.

The game was refined and tested, and then offered to America On-Line for inclusion in the AOL gaming environment. It was meant to help fill out the AOL offerings by providing a little something for every possible demographic of their membership. The game officially “rolled out” in October of 1996, in a context where, according to the experts, in a best-case scenario, the game might account for perhaps 10,000 hours of AOL connect time per month.

A funny thing happened. The game quickly became one of the most popular activities on the AOL site. Within three months the game had reached a level ten times greater than the most ambitious of expectations, accounting for over 100,000 hours per month. And it kept growing.

Slingo Factoids As of 8/02, there have been over 2 billion Slingo games played. Slingo hosts almost 2 million unique players each month, with an average of approximately 140,000 total daily hours of game play.

Slingo stands as one of the top ten most downloaded games. Slingo ranks 4 th amongst all game publishers based upon unique monthly users, and 7 th (following Microsoft’s 6 online products) in total game plays. The world “Slingo” has been one of the top 5 most accessed keywords on America Online for three straight years.