The games that opened this trade, and what is left of them

Between 1998 and 2006 a handful of slots and card games established the whole idea of a shared online "progressive" (thirteen of them are in the table below), and every one is still listed in the catalogue of the supplier which now owns them (Games Global, which took over the Microgaming portfolio).

"Listed in the catalogue" turns out to be a much weaker statement than it sounds, and separating it from "played" is the only useful thing anybody can do with this family of games.

The comparison sites do not separate the two. They publish the name, the "seed" (the figure the "pot" restarts from), the "return to player" and sometimes a screenshot, and then they mark the game available, which is true in the sense that a browser will load it and false in every sense that you would care about.

The figure that does the separating is the interval since the pot last fell, tracked game by game, and it divides these thirteen titles into three groups with nothing in common except a shared supplier (the arithmetic of the division is in the last column of the table): three of them are "alive", seven have gone between three and five years without paying anybody, and three have gone between six and eleven years.

We publish the whole family in one table because the contrast is the information, and because a reader who sees "available" beside King Cashalot deserves to see "9 years 8 weeks" beside it as well!

The whole family, read against one figure

Cash Splash, and a claim that cannot be checked

Cash Splash is the eldest of them, released in 1998, and the release date is the one part of its story that is properly documented (a trade magazine of the period reported it, which is as close to a primary source as a game of that age gets).

It is also, on the evidence of the trackers, in excellent health. The pot last fell eleven days before we read it, which is in line with an "average interval" of 1 day 21 hours; it restarts from a seed of $5,000 (the smallest seed in the family is $800, on Fruit Fiesta). For a game nearly thirty years old that is a remarkable amount of "traffic".

What we will not write is the sentence that appears on almost every page about it, which is that Cash Splash was the first online progressive jackpot anywhere. No primary source for it exists so far as we can establish, and an assertion of that size would carry one if it were sound; what the record does support is that the game is a "pioneer" of the category, which is a narrower and a far more defensible statement.

The returns reported for it are also in conflict, and the conflict is internal to a single source: the same site gives 91.62 per cent in one table and 90.47 per cent in the game's own entry (the same disagreement appears on Tunzamunni, at 90 and 90.04). We print the first and flag the second, because we would rather show you the disagreement than pick whichever figure reads better.

The three that are still being played

Treasure Nile is the second of the living three, and it carries the harshest entry condition in the family. The jackpot needs £0.50 on each of nine lines, a total of £4.50 a spin, with five "King Tut" symbols landing on the ninth of them. Its pot last fell twelve days before our reading, from a seed of $40,000 (we read the trackers on 18 October 2026, and every interval on this page is counted to that date).

Major Millions is the third, and it is the one with a place in the history of the subject, because it held the record for the largest online jackpot in 2002, with a prize of €1.5 million (a secondary source, and the only one we could find for it). Its interval since the last win is 15 weeks 1 day, against an average of 9 weeks 5 days (about five payments a year), which is slower than it ought to be but still inside the range of a game that people open.

The condition on Major Millions is the familiar one of the period: five logos on line fifteen, at a qualifying stake, and we set out on the minimum stake that qualifies why that single "qualifying stake" rule is the most expensive sentence in these games.

All three of the survivors pay badly by modern standards, and there is no way to dress the figures up: 91.62 per cent on Cash Splash, 92.11 on Treasure Nile and 89.37 on Major Millions (LotsaLoot, at 89.95, is no better), against a modern slot at about 96 per cent and a fixed jackpot game at 96.81 (Fountain of Youth, at Playtech). Their appeal is the pot, and the pot is the only part of the proposition that has not aged.

King Cashalot, and a counter with nobody behind it

If one game explains why this page exists, it is King Cashalot, and the explanation is four numbers long.

The "counter" reads $2,224,299 (the figure on the trackers on 18 October 2026, and it will have moved by the time you read this). The largest prize the machine has ever paid out, in its whole recorded history, was $1,527,228, the average of its wins is $654,283, and the last person to collect anything from it did so 9 years 8 weeks before we looked. So the sum on display exceeds the record of the game itself by 45 per cent, which is not a promotional achievement but a symptom.

The mechanism behind the symptom is simple enough. A pot climbs with "turnover" and empties with wins, so a game that nobody plays accumulates slowly and empties never, and the number on the screen grows into a figure which the game has no history of paying. Five king wilds have to land on the ninth line for it to be collected (one line out of nine), at a return of 91 per cent while a player waits for them.

Roulette Royale is the same case in a different shape: $609,230 on the counter against a largest ever payment of $440,353, and no win for 11 years 18 weeks (its record and the average of its wins are the same figure, which tells its own story about how many wins there have been). Triple Sevens Blackjack has been quiet for 6 years 30 weeks.

The card and table games, and the one survivor

Six of the thirteen titles are not slots (two video poker, two table poker, one roulette and one blackjack), and they have fared worse than the reels, which we did not expect when we began reading the trackers.

Jackpot Deuces and SupaJax, both of them video poker, have gone 3 years 11 weeks and 3 years 7 weeks respectively, while Cyberstud Poker and Poker Ride, both table poker, have gone 4 years 18 weeks and 4 years 36 weeks; Roulette Royale and Triple Sevens Blackjack are the two already named. Not one of the six has a published return in the trackers, and none has a published seed either (the entry is blank in both columns, six times over).

One table game of the family is thriving, and it is the one attached to a working "network" rather than to a pot of its own. Roulette Mega Moolah, built by Switch Studios (and listed in the Games Global catalogue), takes its seeds and its win history from the Mega Moolah "pool", and the single-number bet on it is published at a return of 93.61 per cent.

The lesson of that single exception is worth more than the rest of the section. A table game with a jackpot does not die because it is a table game; it dies because its pot has no players, and attaching the same wheel to a network with real traffic behind it (the Mega Moolah "Major" falls most days) solves the problem completely.

What "available" means on a list, and what it ought to mean

We would not tell a reader to avoid these games (and we would not press him to play them either), because that is not the argument of this page.

The argument is that a list which prints "available" and stops has told you almost nothing, and that the one figure which would tell you something is public, free and updated daily on the trackers (we pay nothing for it, and neither would you). Three of these thirteen titles are products, seven are "catalogue entries" with a counter attached, and three are "museum pieces" with money in them.

A reader who wants the pot and understands the price has every right to play any of them; on two of the three survivors he will be in company. A reader who opens King Cashalot because a comparison page listed it beside Mega Moolah has been misled, not by a false statement, but by a true one with the context removed.

That distinction is the whole of our editorial method, and this family of games is where it shows at its clearest!

Three casinos that still carry them

• Casino ClassicMalta Gaming Authority · Kahnawake · AGCO for Ontario, on a separate siteVisit
• Yukon GoldMalta Gaming Authority · Kahnawake · AGCO for Ontario, on a separate siteVisit
• Quatro CasinoMalta Gaming Authority · KahnawakeVisit

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