If you know anything about online slots then you’ll be aware of the Age of the Gods, a legendary collection of fantasy-themed games created by veteran Estonian slot studio Playtech.

Despite having only existed for five years, the Age of the Gods slot series is widely considered to be the most successful and recognizable slot franchise of all time, with over 20 games available to play at online casinos around the world.

Each individual Age of the Gods slot has totally different bonus features and mechanics and is themed around famous mythical Gods, demigods, and heroes from a variety of time periods and cultures such as Roman, ancient Greece, and Norse mythology.

How Disney’s acquisition of Marvel Entertainment led to the creation of Age of the Gods

Interestingly, the Age of the Gods series was never intended to become as big as it did, in fact, it’s debatable as to whether the Age of the Gods series would even exist at all, if not for Disney’s acquisition of Marvel Entertainment in 2009.

Why does Disney’s acquisition of Marvel have any bearing on an unrelated Playtech slot series developed seven years later? Well, before Age of the Gods existed Playtech’s most popular series of games was actually Marvel slots, these featured some of the brand’s most iconic superheroes and villains.

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Throughout the mid-2010s Playtech’s game selection featured a who’s-who of Marvel Entertainment, offering the following slots: Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, Spider-Man: Attack of the Green Goblin, The Incredible Hulk, Thor: The Mighty Avenger, Blade, Captain America: The First Avenger, Daredevil, Elektra, Fantastic Four, Wolverine, X-Men and Ghost Rider.

In 2013, when Disney gained full control of all of Marvel Entertainment and their subsidiaries, they announced that they were cleaning up the brand image of Marvel, ultimately, this marked the end of Marvel slots upon the expiration of their licensing agreement with Playtech in 2017.

Years and years of hard work from dedicated teams of online slot developers had gone into creating this huge collection of Marvel slots, so it seemed almost unimaginable that these games would be released into the ether, never to be seen again.

In addition to the wasted time and effort, there was also an issue regarding players. The Marvel slots were much-loved progressive jackpot games, if their favorite slots were deleted would they go and play another provider’s games instead?

Thankfully, someone at Playtech had the grand idea of rebranding all of the Marvel slots, so rather than get rid of them entirely, they developed a new brand (Age of the Gods) and created new artwork, essentially placing it on top of the old slots in a like for like swap. 

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Players would still be able to play their favorite Marvel slots with the same bonus features, mechanics, jackpots, and mathematical models, just with different branding.

What makes the Age of the Gods series so popular?

Just like their predecessors, the Age of the Gods slots proved immensely popular mostly down to the fact that there were so many games for players to sink their teeth into, each Age of the Gods slot offering unique mechanics and bonus features.

In addition to this, the Age of the Gods slots series played host to the Age of the Gods Progressive Jackpot, a truly legendary four-tiered jackpot made up of the Power Jackpot, Extra Power Jackpot, Super Power Jackpot, and the Ultimate Power Jackpot.

These jackpots could drop at any time and can see players win in excess of £1,000,000, the most lucrative of these four jackpots payout every 40 days (on average) whilst the other three payouts on a daily and hourly basis, so it’s not hard to see why players were drawn to them. 

What’s more, fans of the original Marvel slots immediately recognized these progressive jackpots, as they’re exactly the same jackpots that existed prior to the Age of the Gods release.

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How has Playtech kept the Age of the Gods series fresh?

With so many Age of the Gods games out there the series was bound to go stale after some time, however, in a bid to freshen things up Playtech has enlisted the help of smaller studios that fall under their management to create several brand new games. 

Playtech Vikings, Playtech Origins, and Ash Gaming have all stepped up to the plate in recent years to create their own titles. This has also led to an entirely new Age of the Gods series known as Age of the Gods Norse.

This brand new series of Age of the God slots features a clean new design that looks significantly more attractive than the original slots, however, despite being a lot of fun, it’s fair to suggest that they don’t really have the same charm as the original games.

What does the future of the Age of the Gods series look like?

Despite it only being a few months since their last release, it feels like a long time since we’ve heard anything about a new Age of the Gods game.

There’s nothing on Playtech’s roadmap to suggest we’ll be getting a new mythical-themed slot any time soon, which is quite disappointing. That being said, with so many fingers in so many pies, it’s hard to tell what Playtech is doing at any given moment.

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There was some debate as to whether Age of the Gods was on the way out following the landmark release of Kingdoms Rise. The groundbreaking Playtech slot series features many similarities to Age of the Gods, and many thought it was a like-for-like replacement.

However, like Age of the Gods, the Kingdoms Rise series seems to have gone on the back burner in recent months. We’re genuinely not sure what to expect from the series going forward, perhaps Playtech will pass the franchise onto some of their smaller studios to work on? 

However, if Playtech is to continue their trend of releasing exciting new live casino game shows then we might well see the Age of the Gods characters appear in more of these games in the future, rather than online slots, but who knows? Only time will tell.