I was queuing for the bogs at a gig in Leeds, sometime last winter, freezing, ears already ringing, and the lad standing in front of me had his phone out. Not texting. He was playing something with Lemmy’s face on it. Actual Lemmy, spinning past on a set of reels, three in a row, and then the opening of Ace of Spades kicked in out of a phone speaker at about four percent of the volume that song deserves.
I said something to him like, is that what I think it is. He said yeah, mate, it’s the official one. Then the queue moved and that was that.
But it sat with me for weeks afterwards, because I genuinely had no idea this was a thing. And it turns out it has been a thing since 2016, and quite a lot of your record collection has quietly been turned into gambling machinery while you were not looking.
The night I found out Lemmy was a slot machine
The Motörhead game came out of NetEnt, a Swedish developer, and it landed in 2016, which is the year after Lemmy died. Louder covered it at the time and framed it more or less as a tribute, which, honestly, is not the daft reading of it that you might assume. Lemmy was a fruit machine man. Famously so. The Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset, him parked at the machine, feeding it, hours at a stretch. If you were going to pick one musician in the entire history of the form who would not have objected to being turned into a slot machine, it is probably him.
The game itself is a 5 reel thing with 76 paylines and an RTP of 96.98%, and Lemmy is the top paying symbol on it, which I find weirdly moving in a way I cannot fully defend. There is a whole bit built around Ace of Spades. The bass is in there, the actual recorded bass, not some session player doing a polite approximation.
And once you notice one of these, you start noticing all of them.
Why the studios went digging through the back catalogues
NetEnt did not stop at one. There is a whole family of these games that got branded internally as NetEnt Rocks, and it is Guns N’ Roses, Jimi Hendrix, Motörhead, and later on Ozzy Osbourne. The Guns N’ Roses one came with Welcome to the Jungle and Paradise City in it. The Hendrix one arrived in April 2016 with three separate free spins rounds, each one named after a track, so you have got Crosstown Traffic, Little Wing and Purple Haze all doing different mechanical jobs inside the same game. Which is a properly odd sentence to have to write about a psychedelic guitar record from 1967.
The commercial logic is not complicated and it is not really about music at all. A slot game lives or dies on whether anyone picks it out of a wall of four thousand other ones, and almost all of those four thousand are about pharaohs, or fruit, or vaguely Norse blokes with axes. Stick a face on it that forty million people already recognise and you have solved your entire discovery problem in one go. The band is doing the marketing work that the studio would otherwise have to buy.
Play’n GO worked out the same maths from a slightly different direction and went after metal specifically. Sabaton was their first branded game, 5 reels, 3 rows, only 10 paylines, and very high volatility, which for a Sabaton game feels about right. They followed it with the Testament. Somewhere along the way they picked up a reputation as the music slot specialists, which is a job title I did not know existed until about eighteen months ago.
So what does the band actually get out of it
This is the bit everybody wants to know and it is also the bit nobody publishes properly, so I will be straight with you about the limits of what is on record.
What is on record is the shape of the deals. The Ozzy game did not come from a handshake with Ozzy over a cup of tea. Blabbermouth reported the arrangement at the time and it went through Global Merchandising Services, who are a merch and brand licensing outfit. That is the tell. These are not sync deals in the way a film placement is a sync deal, and they are not really record company business either. They sit in the merchandising pile, in the same drawer as the tour tees and the enamel pins and the limited run of picture discs.
Which actually explains a lot about how they get greenlit. Merchandising is where a legacy act’s income genuinely lives now, specially for the ones whose catalogue is done growing. Nobody is selling records. Touring gets harder every year and more expensive and eventually somebody’s knees go. But the logo, the mascot, the face, the sleeve art, that stuff can be licensed forever and it costs the estate almost nothing to say yes.
So the honest answer is that a slot licence is probably not life changing money for a band of that size, but it is repeating money for an asset that is otherwise just sitting there. And for an estate, which has fiduciary duties and heirs and a lawyer sending emails, repeating money for an asset that is just sitting there is very hard to turn down. Fair is fair.
The sound design bit that nobody ever writes about
Here is the part I find genuinely fascinating and it never gets covered, because most of the writing about these games is done by gambling sites who do not care about audio, and the rest is done by music sites who are too busy being appalled to look under the bonnet.
A slot game needs audio that responds to events. Small win, big win, near miss, feature trigger, feature ending. That is five or six distinct emotional moments and they can happen in any order, at any speed, for hours. A song does not work like that. A song has an intro and a build and a chorus and it takes four minutes.
So somebody, some poor sod in an office in Stockholm or Malta, has to sit with the master recordings and cut them apart. Find a two second stab that reads as triumph. Find a riff fragment that can loop indefinitely without driving a person insane. Layer the tracks so the drums are always there but the guitar only comes in when you are winning. That last technique is adaptive layering and it is exactly what a games composer does, except a games composer writes original material for it and these people are working with a finished mix that was never designed to come apart.
There is a second problem underneath that one, which is compression. Slot audio has to survive a phone speaker in a noisy room, so it gets squashed absolutely flat, and squashing a record that was already mastered loud in the first place does horrible things to it. Anything with dynamics in it loses them. Which is fine for a band whose entire recorded output is a wall, and completely ruinous for anything with quiet bits in it. I would love to know what the poor sod tasked with the Hendrix game made of that particular brief, because half the reason those records work is the space around the notes.
Most of them botch it, to be honest with you. You get a thin MIDI-ish cover version, or a three second clip of the chorus that fires so often you would happily never hear that song again. The good ones hold up though. The Motörhead one holds up. Whoever did it clearly understood that the appeal of that band is the low end and they kept the low end in.
Where these things actually live now
Almost none of this ends up in an arcade, which is what threw me at first. Branded games like these are built for the online market, so they turn up in the online slots libraries of licensed British operators, sitting in a grid alongside the pharaohs and the fruit. TheOnlineCasino is one of the Gambling Commission licensed British sites carrying the big studio catalogues, NetEnt among them, so that is the sort of library where these branded titles tend to surface. Worth saying plainly, the games are gambling products first and band merchandise second, whatever the artwork is doing. The Lemmy on the reel is not there for your benefit.
The honest bit, because it is not all brilliant
I have made this sound more charming than it deserves, so let me put the other side.
There are fans who find the whole thing grim and they are not wrong to. Gambling harm in this country is real and it is not evenly spread, and a music scene that has always had a slightly complicated relationship with self destruction is maybe not the ideal place to be putting slot machines. Dressing a betting product in the sleeve art of a band somebody loves is a deliberate act of trust transfer. That is what the licence buys. You already trust the logo, so you extend a bit of that to the thing wearing it, and you probably do it without noticing.
There is also the consent problem, which gets worse the longer an artist is dead. Lemmy at a fruit machine is documented and it makes the Motörhead game feel earned. But estates outlive the person’s actual opinions, and in twenty years time somebody’s grandchildren will be signing off on licences for a musician who never got asked and might have told them where to stick it. That will definitely happen. It is already happening in other corners of the merchandising world.
And then the boring one. Some of these games are just bad. A licence is not a design document and a few of them are the most generic five reel thing imaginable with a photo pasted over the top, which is a worse insult to the band than not doing it at all.
What it all says about the state of the catalogue
I keep coming back to that lad in the toilet queue. He was not gambling because he liked slot machines. He was doing it because Lemmy was on it, and that is the whole business model right there, said out loud, in one blurry second outside a gig in Leeds.
Every legacy act is now a licensing portfolio whether they wanted to be or not. Tees, biopics, orchestral tribute tours, that awful thing where they put a hologram on a stage, and yes, this. It is not a betrayal exactly. It is just what happens to a catalogue that stopped being a living thing and started being an asset, and it is available to anyone with a cheque and a lawyer.
Would Lemmy have cared? I really do not think he would have. But he is a bad test case, because Lemmy would have played the machine himself and then told you the odds were rubbish. He’d have been right about that too.