The Symbol That Lands Without a Price on It A Hold and Spin Round Built Around a Value Nobody Knows Yet

This application covers an electronic gaming machine that runs a two stage game: an ordinary spin, and then a held bonus round in which prize carrying symbols stick to the screen while everything around them respins. The specific thing claimed is what happens when a symbol arrives during that bonus round carrying no value at all. The machine detects it, works out a value for it separately, and folds that value into the final total. It was filed by Aristocrat Technologies Australia Pty Limited, the Sydney based gaming machine manufacturer, and is the latest step in a divisional chain reaching back to United States provisional filings from 2017.

The Problem

The background section is a plain account of how these machines earn their keep. A player loads a credit balance, wagers from it, and the machine uses a random number generator to pick an outcome, which is then dressed up as symbols landing on a grid. The return to player percentage and the fairness of the random draw are heavily regulated, which means the one lever a designer can actually pull is presentation: what the symbols look like, when they resolve, and how long the player waits to find out.

The specification states the commercial position directly. Popularity with players depends heavily on the entertainment the machine provides, and operators replace machines that do not hold attention. Bonus rounds exist for that reason. They offer a chance at larger prizes than the base game allows, and they change the texture of play.

A conventional bonus round has a structural weakness, though. Once the triggering symbols land and their values are visible, the arithmetic is settled. The player can add up what is on screen and knows roughly what the round is worth before it finishes. Every further symbol is simply another known number added to a running total. There is no point at which the outcome becomes genuinely opaque again, which flattens the back half of the feature.

What This Invention Does

Claim 1 is written as an apparatus claim and it insists on real hardware: a display, a credit input mechanism accepting coins, banknotes, cards or printed tickets, hardware meters including a credit meter and a win meter, a random number generator, and a bank of physical buttons. The symbol set is split into configurable symbols, which can carry an assigned prize value, and non-configurable symbols, which cannot.

The game runs in two presentation stages. The first is the ordinary spin. If a triggering number of configurable symbols appears in it, the machine starts a second stage with an initial quantity of spins. For each of those spins it does two things: it keeps every configurable symbol locked at the position where it landed, and it respins only the positions those held symbols do not occupy. This is the mechanic the industry calls hold and spin, which Aristocrat is generally credited with popularising through the Lightning Link series.

The distinguishing step comes next. During the second stage the controller must determine whether a mystery symbol is displayed at any position, and in response to determining that one is, determine a value for it. Only then is the stage result calculated from the values of all the held configurable symbols. A mystery symbol is one whose value is not revealed at the moment it appears; in the specification it lands as a question mark and is converted afterwards.

How the value gets decided is left open in claim 1 and filled in by the dependent claims. Claim 2 puts a spinning wheel on the display, divided into sections each carrying a value, and the section the wheel stops on becomes the value of the mystery symbol. A single spin can set the value for every mystery symbol on screen at once, or the wheel can be spun separately for each. The specification also allows the value to be drawn from a range with no wheel at all, to be a named jackpot rather than a credit figure, or to be set to the sum of the values already showing on the other symbols.

Key Features

• A symbol that defers its own value. The mystery symbol occupies a display position and counts toward the total, but its worth is not fixed until the machine resolves it separately.
• Resolution inside the held round. Detection and valuation are recited as steps within the second presentation stage, so the suspense sits in the middle of the feature rather than at its start.
• A wheel as the valuation device. The first dependent claim ties the value to a displayed wheel of sections, turning an accounting step into a visible secondary game.
• One spin or many. The specification covers both setting every mystery symbol to a single wheel result and spinning the wheel once per symbol, which are materially different volatility profiles.
• Jackpot labels as values. Wheel sections can carry named jackpots such as mini, minor, major, maxi or grand rather than credit amounts, letting a mystery symbol resolve into a progressive prize.
• Extra spins after the initial allocation. A dependent claim allows the machine to determine an additional quantity of spins once the initial ones are used, with configurable symbols still held.
• Hardware recited in the claim. Meters, a coin chute or bill collector, a random number generator and physical buttons are elements of claim 1, not background description.

Who Is Behind It

Aristocrat Technologies Australia Pty Limited is the Australian operating company of Aristocrat Leisure Limited, a business founded by Len Ainsworth in 1953, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, and run from North Ryde in Sydney. It supplies gaming machines, casino management systems and digital games across regulated markets worldwide, and publishes its corporate details on its official site.

Two inventors are named: Hua Xu and Daniel Marks. Marks appears on several Aristocrat feature game filings from this period, including a companion application on repeater symbols published in the same journal issue.

The chain is straightforward. AU 2026202116 is a divisional of Australian application 2023274211, itself a divisional of Australian application 2018220052. The specification also claims priority to three United States provisional applications: 62/543,245 filed 9 August 2017, 62/553,971 filed 4 September 2017, and 62/658,325 filed 16 April 2018. The priority country is therefore the United States, even though the applicant is Australian.

Why It Matters

Hold and spin is one of the most heavily copied mechanics in the modern gaming machine business. Once a format becomes standard across a floor, the competitive question stops being whether to offer it and becomes what can be layered on top without breaking the maths. A symbol that arrives with an undetermined value is a clean answer, because it adds a second moment of uncertainty inside a round that would otherwise be pure accumulation, and it does so without touching the regulated return to player figure.

The filing pattern is worth reading on its own terms. Two divisionals deep in Australia, off a family with three United States provisional roots, is what a manufacturer does when a mechanic has commercial legs and it wants overlapping claim scope across slightly different implementations. Rivals file the same way and for the same reason.

Context matters because of where these machines end up. Australia has an unusually high density of gaming machines per head, and gambling regulation here is a live political subject at state level. A patent covering how a bonus round withholds and then reveals prize information sits close to a genuine public debate about the design of these games, even though the document itself reads purely as an engineering disclosure.

Related Concepts

• Casino game – the broader category the machine and its bonus round belong to.
• Progressive jackpot – the prize type a mystery symbol can resolve into via a wheel section.
• Gambling in Australia – the regulatory and social setting for the applicant’s home market.
• Light and Wonder – a principal competitor filing on comparable feature mechanics.
• Nevada Gaming Commission – one of the approval bodies a machine of this type must satisfy in its largest market.
• AU 2026202116 on IP Australia – the official register record for the application.

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AU 2026202116 was published in the Australian Official Journal of Patents on 9 April 2026 and is open for public inspection. Patent applications represent inventions that are sought to be protected and do not necessarily reflect commercially available products.