Original Release: IGT, 2000
An early video slot release from IGT that remains popular due to its cute and unique presentation and famously low volatility
Texas Tea (IGT, 2000)
Where to Buy: IGT 135-game Megapak or bundle w/ Little Green Men (both for PC)
First released in 2000, Texas Tea was right in the midst of the wave of casinos transitioning from traditional reels to video slots. It was one of the big hits of that period and also one of the most enduringly popular, with crusty old 25-year-old machines still hanging on in the dark corners of casino floors – even on notoriously stingy Vegas Strip floors!
Why so popular? Well, it had “advanced” and charming graphics for its time. But the enduring popularity is more about it quickly developing a reputation for breaking you even a lot of the time, never letting you get too far down before a bonus game puts you right back in it. In fact, the design is so generous (by general slot standards anyway) that it’s been gradually nerfed by casinos – pushed back into danker and danker corners, “deferred” maintenance that prevents certain buttons from working, and only providing around 20% of the comps (or maybe none at all) that other games do.
That’s not to say it’s a gold mine of free money. It’ll gradually take it from you over time, like every other game that remains on casino floors; it just does it MUCH SLOWER than most other games, allowing you to hang out for a long period sponging free drinks and maybe racking up some points without much risk. But this keeps its spot 25 years later simply because people still ask for it, and they’ll at least spend money on other stuff if you can get them through the casino doors (more than half the battle in the first place for the house).
Like many of IGT’s early 2000s games, it’s a true “penny slot” in that you can bet as little as one cent per spin to play just the center line. Covering the whole field is 9 lines, so a 9 cent minimum bet for that ranging up to 25 cents per line if you’re feeling like Buck Strickland. Of course, it is possible for casinos to jack up the minimum bets, but I’ve seen several of the old machines still alive and kicking over the last few years and only seen one where they had jumped the minimum at all (to 10 cents per line, on a machine that had broken buttons anyway at Silver Legacy in Reno). I just found two in Vegas at fairly big casinos in mid-2024 (though off-Strip) that are still the true 1 cent minimum bet. Casinos often only have just one of these machines still hanging on, but it’s hiding in there somewhere as it remains fairly popular with old-school players.
All right, so why does the game seem to break you even (or even produce a winning session) for you more often than most? For starters, it has a lot of regular line win possibilities. Some of these are “fractional,” or you get just like 50% of your wager back, but in the long run that helps and frequency of hitting multiple ways/lines of just three symbols often adds you up to a win of a tad above your wager amount.
It also has two different bonus features that seem to pop fairly often, and all but guarantee you at least a decent “catch-up” win when they do. The one you’ll see most often is when three symbols of game mascot Texas Ted appear in any position on the field; you get an automatic, seemingly randomly generated amount as he writes you a “dividend check” that can range up to 100x your wager (or $9 on a minimum 9 cents to cover all lines). But the really big one is the “Big Oil” bonus, activated when an oil derrick first appears in the leftmost column and then two more land in a line (can be diagonal as well as horizontal). That one is also random and can range up to 995x your wager (or about $89 for the 9 cent minimum wager). Nothing earth-shaking, it’s true, but if you’re sitting and playing at small denominations looking to grind for a long time these bonuses very often catch up or exceed whatever losses you’ve been accumulating. My most recent session I ran through $500 mostly at 45 cents per spin (so about 1000 spins plus some change) and hit Big Oil five times and the Texas Ted around eight times (so under 100 spins to some kind of bonus feature on average).
Aside from the favorable terms, part of the appeal is in the game’s cute hand-drawn graphics. They’re reminiscent of clumsy CD-ROM games from the 90s when that tech first came out, but in a charming way that someone actually put some care and effort into. It was a style that was quickly abandoned and looks very distinct from the cheap “static images” approach that reigned supreme from the mid-2000s well into the 2010s.
Just be aware that Texas Tea: Strike it Rich is a much newer version that appears to be more volatile, and is more readily found in modern casinos but isn’t the one being reviewed here.
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