A Blast From The Microgaming Past - You Don't Know What You've Got Until It's Gone

[ChopleyIOM]

One of the topics that keeps coming up here on CM is how good Microgaming used to be back in the Viper Client days. A few of us old-timers will reminisce wistfully about the era of high-RTP games with sensible volatility, plentiful deposit bonuses, and the wide selection of fantastic slots with gorgeous hand-drawn graphics and evocative soundtracks (Amber's bonus track on Immortal Romance, anyone?).

There was no checking help files for RTPs, because they were all the same, and they were all somewhere around 95.5%-97%.

Even in the days of a slower, clonkier internet, everything loaded quickly and disconnects/game errors were rare, thanks to the locally installed Viper Client taking care of most things, and Microgaming's unified backend servers taking care of everything else.

Bonus offers were regular and came with sensible wagering, a relatively modest deposit with a bonus attached could easily set you up for an entire weekend of slotting entertainment, and withdrawals were par for the course, not some sort of rare exotic treat.

Of course a few of the games from that era are still around, but not only often with ruined RTPs, they've also managed to make them look and sound worse as well! (Oh to have the Viper Client version of Immortal Romance back.....) And of course we've lost the awesomeness of the massively configurable autoplayer that the Viper Client used to have. (Even where autoplay is still available on their new versions of these old games, the autoplay options are shite.)

Alas I cannot bring those days back in totality, but I can do a little bit, because here is a video from 2014 of me taking on a 120% bonus at the Platinum Play Viper Client casino, and setting about four of the 'high volatility' (LOL!) games of the time, Thunderstruck 2, Immortal Romance, Finer Reels Of Life, and Playboy.

I've recorded a new 20 minute introduction, and then the rest of the running time is the original video I made back in early 2014. This was the later days of the Viper Client casino, the new 'shopfront' casinos (Redbet is one that springs to mind) were very much already a thing, but for those of us more discerning gamblers who preferred a gentlemanly slots experience, places such as Platinum Play remained an option.

In terms of this session there are some good wins in there, loads and loads of features, a decent tussle to try and make wagering, plus the usual oddities of working out wagering via the Viper Client and the abstraction of customer service, I had £4300 of wagering to do so a pretty chunky proposition.

If you choose to watch it, then I hope you enjoy the trip down memory lane!

 

[dunover]

LOL Platinum Play, 32Red, Golden Lounge, yes played at all of them. Apart from the 10GB or more of locally stored files on older Windows 2000 or whatever PCs we had, they were brilliant. If you were skint you could always try for the daily comps on selected demo game to win a 10/25 or 50 bonus chip if in the top 10. There were also more lucrative prizes of up to 1k IIRC for bigger turnover players, remember Vinyl Weatherman always trying to win them?

The games were always reliable despite HDD PCs with limited memory, in the days before SSDs.

And yes, the slots themselves were unrivalled. The pinnacle of game investment and development.

Although TSII was a medium-variance game!

 

[SpinUk]

Vaguelly remember this the first time round and trying myself on one of the viper ones. Failed miserably. They were super smooth though to play there I do remember that.

 

[steveh35]

There was always something mysterious about going into the viper casino unlike now where you have a browser and can generally see other tabs, launching the viper seemed like you were going into a different world and if I remember 32red had a jingle playing as you opened it.

 

[SlamRoyale]

Now that you mention it, I do remember all slots being fast and I was not even on fibre yet. I was on low broadband. Now even with supposed 5g or fibre or whatever some slots take forrrrrrever. But same for everything. website people even on blogspot people made small graphics for dialup. Now a corporate site can take ages to load even with supposed fast internet.

Everything was built better then.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

LOL Platinum Play, 32Red, Golden Lounge, yes played at all of them. Apart from the 10GB or more of locally stored files on older Windows 2000 or whatever PCs we had, they were brilliant. If you were skint you could always try for the daily comps on selected demo game to win a 10/25 or 50 bonus chip if in the top 10. There were also more lucrative prizes of up to 1k IIRC for bigger turnover players, remember Vinyl Weatherman always trying to win them?

The games were always reliable despite HDD PCs with limited memory, in the days before SSDs.

And yes, the slots themselves were unrivalled. The pinnacle of game investment and development.

Although TSII was a medium-variance game!

Towards the backend of the Viper Client era I got my first PC with an SSD in it, a 120GB drive that was pretty expensive, the 240GB variant was beyond what I was willing to pay at the time. (I think 480GB drives were just about a thing but they cost around three bazillion pounds.) I used it as my Windows boot drive and also for apps and games that I wanted the speed boost from.

As such capacity was very much at a premium and I was always keeping an eye on it, not least because I was trying to maintain a full install of World of Warcraft on the same drive, which was a big game.

So I installed the Viper Client on there for an MG casino, and watched with bemusement as over 10GB of precious space on the drive was slowly consumed. What the Viper Client actually did was silently download the entire game cache to a folder on the boot drive that it created then marked as 'hidden', so if you went to the obvious Microgaming folder, you wouldn't see it in there.

There was no option/configuration to tell the Viper Client to put this data anywhere else, so in the end I had to create a junction point on the folder, and pass it off to a hard drive, so the Viper Client didn't know any different and still thought its data was where it expected it to be.

The idea of caching the data locally to make games launch quicker was a sound one, not giving any user control over where the data was stored, and choosing to hide it from the end user, rather less so.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

There was always something mysterious about going into the viper casino unlike now where you have a browser and can generally see other tabs, launching the viper seemed like you were going into a different world and if I remember 32red had a jingle playing as you opened it.

Yeah I agree, as silly as it might sound it really felt like you were sort of 'entering' the casino, not least because MG did unique branding for every casino so they all had their own little intros with bespoke graphics and music. And yes, I still remember the 32Red one

 

[Glunn11]

I'm an American so I missed all that glorious stuff with the Viper Client, but I'm experiencing some weird form of nostalgia by reading this thread. Loved that video Chopley. And the idea of launching the casino software being meaningful to the experience, yup yup yup. It was something kinda special! Like "oh yeah this is the casino I can access through my special program", yanno? Not just a website anyone can access through a browser, but a proper casino experience. I felt that way with 3Dice. I remember even talking like that with my mom, who was my 3Dice buddy. Great times.

I know it's not in the cards, but I'd saw off the organ of your choice to re-enter the pre-social media world. Everything was more colorful.

 

[SlamRoyale]

The idea of caching the data locally to make games launch quicker was a sound one,

I think they still do, through the browser now, or sort of a temporary cache. I think the issue isn't even so much the graphics size now but the load on the GPU. Or I dunno, I find it hard to see a slot game need so much space, but maybe it loads eeeeeverything every spin.

 

[Avernite]

A bit after my time. I only started gambling in 2017, but man do I miss the days where I didn't have to worry about trying to dig up RTPs and you could easily get fair deposit bonuses.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

I think they still do, through the browser now, or sort of a temporary cache. I think the issue isn't even so much the graphics size now but the load on the GPU. Or I dunno, I find it hard to see a slot game need so much space, but maybe it loads eeeeeverything every spin.

Part of the problem is that web browsers generally aren't particularly good at rendering graphics, plus the payload of everything is just heavier these days too, often for entirely legit reasons like security, but also for less scrupulous reasons such as tracking.

Chrome is probably one of the worst offenders these days, what started out as a sleek and fast browser is now a bloaty bag of shite, I find Firefox much better for online slots.

Even where it's done very well (3Dice's web implementation is great), TBH I still miss the old client install model, but I understand why it makes no sense in the world of smartphones and tablets and all the rest of it, far better to just do it all in a browser engine and know it'll work everywhere.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Even the mugs were better! Found at the back of a cupboard

 

[dunover]

Even the mugs were better! Found at the back of a cupboard

View attachment 208451

Which mugs, the coffee ones or us lot?

 

[YouTubeSlots]

Part of the problem is that web browsers generally aren't particularly good at rendering graphics, plus the payload of everything is just heavier these days too, often for entirely legit reasons like security, but also for less scrupulous reasons such as tracking.

Chrome is probably one of the worst offenders these days, what started out as a sleek and fast browser is now a bloaty bag of shite, I find Firefox much better for online slots.

Even where it's done very well (3Dice's web implementation is great), TBH I still miss the old client install model, but I understand why it makes no sense in the world of smartphones and tablets and all the rest of it, far better to just do it all in a browser engine and know it'll work everywhere.

Even in a microgaming thread 3 dice still had to get its daily mention.

Gotta love the choppers dedication to the 3Dice,

They could kill small puppies and i swear you would still be talking about there solid rtps.

 

[SlamRoyale]

Post made try look for the Postcard I once got from a Chinese casino online with $100 HKD redemption. Found out my pals threw out our old stuff