The Complicated History of Gambling in Video Games – From Pinball Bans to Modern Age Ratings: Part 1

Author: Sam Davies

Recent controversy reminds us just how messy the line between gaming and gambling has always been, and how easily it shifts depending on who’s drawing it. Every few years, something sparks the debate all over again, and the latest flashpoint came from an unlikely place.

Early this year, Luck Be A Landlord, an indie video game playable on PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Android and iOS, found itself at the centre of a controversy that speaks volumes about how we define gambling in the digital age. The game, a roguelike deck-builder – meaning players build up a set of items or abilities as they progress through randomly generated challenges – was abruptly removed from the Google Play Store, not for promoting real-money gambling, or for encouraging players to spend on in-app purchases.

In fact, Luck Be A Landlord contains no monetisation at all. Its crime? Failing to disclose “gambling themes” in its content rating, the total of which amounts to a stylised slot machine image, which is incorporated into the story of the game.

The removal sparked immediate backlash, especially since it coincided with another curious case: Balatro, a card-based strategy game designed for mobile phones, was temporarily delisted on some consoles due to its use of poker imagery. In both cases, the games are clearly not gambling in the traditional sense – no wagers, no payouts – yet they were penalised for aesthetics that merely resembled gambling.

This isn’t just about two indie titles falling foul of app store policies. It’s part of a much longer, much messier story about the uneasy overlap between gaming and gambling. From the moral panic over pinball in the 1940s, to loot boxes in FIFA and the playable casinos of Grand Theft Auto, video games have always flirted with the mechanics and language of gambling – sometimes innocently, sometimes not. As digital experiences become ever more immersive and monetised, the question of where entertainment ends and exploitation begins grows more urgent – and harder to answer.

A Brief History of the Panic: Pinball, Arcades and Morality Laws

Long before video games, another coin-operated pastime was accused of corrupting youth and fuelling gambling addictions: the pinball machine. In the early 20th century, cities across the United States – most famously New York in 1942 – banned pinball under the belief that it was a form of gambling, not a game of skill. Mayor at the time Fiorello La Guardia oversaw police raids that confiscated thousands of machines, smashing them in public squares to drive the point home.

The logic was simple: players dropped coins into a machine, hoping for a payout (or at least more plays), with outcomes seemingly determined by chance. In the eyes of the authorities, it was little more than a mechanical slot machine dressed up in flashing lights and bright paint.

It wasn’t until the 1970s, after years of cultural reevaluation and a famous courtroom demonstration of skill-based play, that pinball began to shake off its stigma. What had once been a symbol of vice and juvenile delinquency slowly became an accepted part of mainstream entertainment, eventually evolving into the arcade culture that helped lay the groundwork for home video gaming.

This moral panic may seem quaint in retrospect, but the echoes are hard to ignore. Today, we’re seeing something similar play out in the digital sphere, where games like Luck Be A Landlord and Balatro are being removed or restricted – not because they encourage gambling in any legal sense, but because their mechanics resemble gambling too closely. Never mind that no real money is involved, or that these games are more about strategy than chance. Their aesthetic similarity to slot machines or poker is enough to raise red flags.

In both cases – then and now – the issue isn’t so much about harm as it is about perception. Just as pinball’s flashing lights and unpredictability led authorities to assume the worst, modern game storefronts and age-rating systems are often guided more by optics than nuance. The result is a regulatory climate that struggles to distinguish between a dangerous gambling simulation and a harmless game (even if the themes are only suggestive). The technology has changed, but the cultural reflex remains: when in doubt, ban first and sort out the details later.

Simulated Gambling in Early Video Games

Before “loot boxes” and digital storefront controversies, simulated gambling was already a familiar – if uncontroversial – part of the video game landscape. In the 1980s and 90s, console and arcade games often included casino-style mechanics, not as monetised traps, but as novel diversions or thematic set dressing. Titles like Casino Kid (1989) and Vegas Stakes (1993) let players wander around virtual gambling halls, playing poker, blackjack, or roulette with in-game currency. These weren’t edgy or controversial; if anything, they were thought of more like puzzle games or digital board games than vice simulators.

In fact, casino mechanics became a recurring minigame trope in popular role-playing games, especially Japanese RPGs (JRPGs). Franchises like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest featured in-world casinos where players could spend fictional tokens on slot machines, roulette wheels, or video poker. These minigames were usually optional and often required a decent amount of in-game skill or grinding, rather than real-world money or luck. In Final Fantasy VII, for example, players visited the Gold Saucer, a sort of fantasy Vegas where mini-games and slots existed as a way to earn rare items or cosmetic upgrades. No one saw these moments as anything other than fun distractions.

At the time, there was remarkably little panic around these mechanics. That’s partly because the games themselves were seen as clearly fictional, and partly because there was no meaningful financial dimension to the experience. Unlike real-world gambling, players couldn’t win – or, perhaps more importantly, lose – anything of actual value. Casino minigames were understood as world-building flourishes, tools for immersion and diversion rather than moral dilemmas with real implications.

But the cultural context has shifted since then. Today’s games frequently operate within ecosystems that blur the line between in-game and real-world economies. With the heady rise of microtransactions, premium currencies, and real-money marketplaces, even harmless-looking mechanics can raise red flags in the eyes of gaming regulators. What once would have been seen as harmless slot machine imagery is now evaluated through the lens of monetisation potential and gambling harm, especially when young, underage or unwitting gamers are playing.

That helps explain why a game like Luck Be A Landlord, which would’ve seemed like a quirky throwback in the 90s, now finds itself accused of encouraging gambling, even without a monetised component. As the broader industry has changed, so too has our cultural sensitivity to certain imagery and mechanics. What was once an innocent simulation is now judged by the company it keeps.