Beach Life Slot by Playtech

The reason anyone still loads this one comes down to a single payline. Land five grinning sunglasses-wearing Suns across line 20 at full stake and you take Playtech's network progressive, the pool that once held the Guinness record for the biggest online slot payout and has averaged somewhere north of 2.5 million euros a drop. That is the only route in. The Sun doubles as the wild and fills for everything except the chest and the starfish, but nothing counts toward the jackpot unless it's those exact five Suns, on that exact line, at max bet. Coin size is welded to 0.50 with no line selector to fiddle with, so staying eligible just means playing all 20 lines at 10.00 a spin, every spin.

Strip the progressive out and the game is modest. It's a cheerful cartoon beach, turquoise sea and leaning palms behind reels of scuba divers, a bikini sunbather, a surfer mid-wave and a whole row of ice-cream cones and lollies. The diver is the best of the regular symbols and five of him returns 500x the line bet, with everything under him paying less. A slot deliberately built to feed the jackpot pool rather than the base game, and you feel it in the low ceiling.

Two features break up the spins without ever touching the top prize. Three or more treasure chests sink you into Sunken Treasure, an underwater pick round where you open one chest from the seabed for every Bonus symbol that landed, each holding a cash sum. Three or more starfish, scattered anywhere on the grid, hand you up to 15 free games. Both are ordinary by modern standards, which is the point. In 2006 the draw was never the bonus. It was that one line, at max bet, and the seven-figure number waiting on it.