Bonanza in detail
On 7 December 2016, Big Time Gaming released a mining slot that changed how the industry builds its games. Bonanza is the first title to carry the Megaways engine, a mechanic the Australian studio designed, patented and trademarked. A decade later, hundreds of Megaways games circulate at Pragmatic Play, Blueprint, Red Tiger, Relax Gaming and iSoftBet — every one of them runs on a licence paid to Big Time Gaming. Plenty of pages online forget to mention that, presenting Megaways as a generic format. It is not: it has an inventor, an owner, and Bonanza is its birth certificate.
The principle is easy to describe and far harder to design. The six reels do not show a fixed number of symbols: each displays between two and seven positions, drawn fresh on every spin. The number of ways to win is therefore recalculated each time, between 64 at the low end and 117,649 at the top. Nobody plays permanently with 117,649 combinations; that is a theoretical ceiling, reached when all six reels show seven symbols at once.
Bonanza adds one element on top that its imitators never really copied: a mine cart running horizontally above reels 2 to 5, dropping an extra symbol onto each of them. Those four positions count in the calculation, which is what produces the 117,649 total (seven to the power of six) and gives the game its instantly recognisable silhouette, with that ribbon sliding above the grid.
Wins trigger Reactions, the house version of cascades: winning symbols explode, the ones above drop down, the cart refeeds the central reels, and the chain continues as long as new combinations form. In the base game a reaction applies no multiplier, and a spin's payout stays modest — the big gaps come from elsewhere.
They come from the four scatters spelling G, O, L, D across the grid. Collecting all four letters opens twelve free spins, with five extra spins per additional scatter. During the bonus a multiplier starts at x1 and climbs a point on every winning reaction, with no cap and no reset, including through a retrigger. That counter is what built the game's legend: a long cascade run turns an ordinary spin into a four-figure win.
Big Time Gaming now states a 96.11% RTP — most databases round it to 96% — a hit rate of roughly 38%, stakes from €0.20 to €20 and a ceiling of 26,000 times the stake. That ceiling was 12,000x at launch; it was raised when the game was remastered. A bonus buy at 90 times the stake unlocks the twelve free spins wherever regulation allows it.
