The Klondike, a coin-operated gambling machine that Charles Fey’s company built in San Francisco in 1897, did not pay out in coins. Its caption in an SFO Museum exhibition records that a winning player “was awarded as many as twenty-five drinks, which were payable at the bar.” Fey neither sold nor leased his machines; he installed them in saloons, ran them himself and split the takings with the owners. The reward for playing was the saloon’s to give, and it was given in the saloon.
The incentive moves into the building
The twentieth-century casino moved the gift off the machine and into the building. Las Vegas resorts handed arriving visitors funbooks of coupons for free drinks and matched bets. In 1982 the Sands in Atlantic City started the first slot club, with events and lapel pins for members, and by 1984 Harrah’s there was handing out bonus tickets for every hundred dollars put through a machine, redeemable for rooms and food. UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research puts the reason for that generosity in one line: since 1984 the slots in Atlantic City have out-earned the tables.
Video slots, which simulate the reels on a monitor, had reached Las Vegas in the mid-1970s, and by March 2003 online gambling was a large enough trade for Antigua and Barbuda to take the United States to the World Trade Organization over it. The regulated American market arrived state by state after that, and the building stopped being necessary.
How free spins became an online promotion
Online, the gift moved again, from the building to the account. Free spins became one of the main casino bonuses offered online, alongside deposit matches and no-deposit credit, and they suit slots because the operator can fix the stake of every spin. An operator could hand a customer twenty spins on one game, each worth the same small sum, and hold whatever the spins won as bonus credit, not cash, until it had been bet through several times. It cost less than a room, it could be aimed at a single player, and unlike the drink it told the operator exactly who had taken it and what they played afterwards.
The slot was the natural home for it for a dull reason. A blackjack hand has a decision in it and a bet the player chooses; a spin has neither, so a hundred of them can be credited to an account and counted off one at a time without anyone at the operator having to watch.
How the promotions multiplied
Digital delivery made offers cheap to vary, so they multiplied. Welcome packages pair a deposit match with a block of spins, and reload offers bring back a lapsed account. Loyalty schemes drip spins to regular players in the way the Atlantic City slot clubs once dripped meals, and cashback offers return a share of a week’s losses as credit. The states that license online play have since written rules on how an offer’s conditions must be shown, which the saloon keeper pouring the twenty-fifth drink never needed.
This site’s history of leisure in the twentieth century has television overtaking the cinema as the main entertainment in the home after the 1950s, and the casino’s offer followed onto the same screen a few decades later.
Free spins today
A modern free-spins offer is a short contract that names the game, the number of spins and the value of each, and the date it lapses, and it is open only to players of legal age inside a state that licenses the operator. Seven states have licensed online casinos that are running, and Maine, which legalised them in 2026, had its draft rules out for public comment in October and is expected to open its market in 2027.