Light & Wonder Invests in Bang Bang Games, Which Made Its US Debut Last Year

Small slots studio Bang Bang Games has found another important ally to help bring its games to a wider audience. Light & Wonder, which aggregates Bang Bang’s slots through its Spark program, has announced it’s taking a 20% equity position in the games developer.

Bang Bang’s signature style is to take mechanics from well-known slots series and enhance them with additional features that build on the basic premise. It borrows many of these, like Gigablox, Doublemax, and Multimax from Yggdrasil Gaming, an internationally popular developer based in Malta. Bang Bang and Yggdrasil have a similar distribution relationship to the one with Light & Wonder, dating back to 2020. However, that partnership doesn’t cover the US market, so Bang Bang only arrived here though Light & Wonder last year.

For instance, Gigablox games involve mega-sized symbols that occupy multiple reels and set up big wins across multiple paylines. So when Bang Bang makes a Gigablox game, such as Super Cash Drop Gigablox, it pushes the “bigger” theme to its limit with stretchy wilds and expanding reels.

Bang Bang has also introduced some mechanical series of its own, starting with UltraNudge and now UltraHitz. It has even started piling features on top of features: Its upcoming releases for April include Almighty Thunder UltraHitz Gigablox.

UltraNudge Slots

Bang Bang’s UltraNudge slots include tall columns of Stacked Wilds on the reels. Any winning combo that includes a Wild triggers the UltraNudge feature.

Once UltraNudge is active, the game will pay out winning lines, then drop all symbols down one row. New symbols enter the reels from the top. If there are still any winning combos involving a Wild, this can repeat indefinitely.

The feature also gives players a better chance of triggering a bonus round, since Scatters accumulate throughout the nudges. For instance, if it requires three Scatters to win Free Spins and the player gets two on the initial spin, an UltraNudge could produce the third to trigger the bonus.

UltraHitz Slots

Bang Bang only started making UltraHitz slots recently. In fact, aside from the upcoming Almighty Thunder game, there’s only one title in the series so far: Chilli Champions UltraHitz.

The peppers are what trigger the UltraHitz feature. They work a little bit like an all-ways-pay slot in that you need to land them on consecutive reels from left to right, but their vertical position doesn’t matter. However, up to three peppers can appear as a single symbol. There need to be a minimum of five total to win a prize, and the payout is based on the total number.

There are also Respin peppers. Scoring with one of these locks the other peppers in place and starts a hold-and-spin feature, allowing the player to continue gathering more peppers until there are three consecutive spins without a hit. During free spins, the number of peppers on the reels increases.

It’s not hard to see how that feature might mesh with Gigablox, leading to big wins when the mega-symbol happens to be the thing you’re trying to collect to climb the UltraHitz payout ladder.