Next time the whole family is squeezed around the table at Thanksgiving, go around and ask everyone for their all time favourite game. Grandpa will probably describe something with a lever and a row of spinning fruit, a machine you fed a coin and hoped for the best. Your parents will light up remembering a grey box plugged into the living room TV, and your cousin in his twenties will swear nothing beats the blocky world he built after school. The youngest won’t say much at all. They’ll just hold up whatever is glowing on their phone.
Every generation has its own answer, and each one says a lot about how people liked to spend a free hour. So grab a double double and let’s take a walk through the eras, starting with a machine that’s older than anyone at that table.
Where it all started: the lever and the reels
Around the end of the 1890s, a San Francisco mechanic named Charles Fey built the Liberty Bell, a cast iron cabinet with three reels, a handful of symbols and a lever on the side. You dropped in a nickel, pulled, and waited for the bells to line up. It was an instant hit in saloons, and before long the “one armed bandit” had copycats everywhere. For the oldest members of the family, those clunking reels were the original coin operated thrill. Keep that little machine in mind, because we’ll be coming back to it.
When the machines lived in arcades
By 1981, kids with a pocket full of quarters had a new favourite: a stubborn ape throwing barrels down a half built tower. Donkey Kong turned the arcade into the place to be after school for the teens who are now today’s Gen X parents. Look closely and you can see what it borrowed from Fey’s cabinet. There was the coin slot, the flashing lights and that rush of one more try before your money ran out, only now the prize was your initials at the top of the high score list.
The living-room console takeover
In 1985 the fun moved into our basements. Super Mario Bros. arrived on the NES and sold more than 40 million copies, holding the title of best selling game for roughly two decades until Wii Sports finally knocked it off. A few years later, millennials found their own obsession. Pokémon Red and Blue landed in North America in 1998, sold 31.38 million copies and turned every schoolyard into a trading floor.
Sandboxes, mods, and the PC crowd
The next big thing came from a small indie studio. Minecraft appeared in 2009 and has since become the best selling game ever made, with more than 300 million copies sold. Its secret was handing players an empty world and a pile of blocks and then stepping aside. For a lot of Gen Z, it was less a game than a place to hang out with friends.
A whole arcade in your pocket
By 2016 the most powerful console in the house was the phone. Pokémon GO sent millions of people walking laps around the neighbourhood and pulled in 103 million downloads in its first month. For a brief, strange summer, grandparents, teenagers and office workers were all standing at the same park bench trying to catch the same creature.
The popularity scoreboard
| Game | Debut | Where you played it | How big it got |
| Donkey Kong | 1981 | Arcade cabinet | Close to 15 million units |
| Super Mario Bros | 1985 | NES console | More than 40 million copies |
| Pokemon Red and Blue | 1998 | Game Boy handheld | 31.38 million copies |
| Minecraft | 2009 | PC and consoles | More than 300 million copies |
| Pokemon GO | 2016 | Mobile phones | 103 million first-month downloads |
Every era found one game that nearly everybody seemed to own at some point. One name is missing from this list, though, and it happens to be the oldest of the lot.
Back to the reels
Remember Fey’s Liberty Bell? It never really went away. It just kept changing rooms. The spinning reels moved from saloons to casino floors, from mechanical gears to video screens, and today they’ve landed on the same phones that run Pokémon GO.
For adults, online slots are now one of the most popular ways to play. Ontario opened its regulated online market on April 4, 2022, for players 19 and older, and it has grown quickly. In its 2024 to 2025 figures, iGaming Ontario reported $82.7 billion wagered, up about 32 per cent from the year before, along with 2.6 million active player accounts.
Modern slots have kept the lights and the satisfying spin from the old cabinets, then added themes and bonus rounds Fey could never have fit into cast iron. If the math behind them feels like a puzzle, this slot machine guide explains in plain English what a 96 per cent return to player really means over an evening, and why two games with the same theme can feel so different. Plenty of players who like to do their homework also read independent Ontario casino reviews before they spin.
Regulated sites in Ontario also build responsible gambling tools right into the experience, such as deposit limits, reality check reminders, cooling off periods and self exclusion, with the AGCO and iGaming Ontario keeping operators in line. If the fun ever starts to feel like something heavier, ConnexOntario offers free and confidential support any time of day.
It’s funny to think that the oldest game in the family story is still in the running. From a nickel in a saloon to a tap on a screen at the cottage, the reels have outlasted barrel throwing apes and pocket monsters alike, and I suspect they’ll still be spinning when today’s kids are the ones being asked about their favourite game at the Thanksgiving table.
