© 2026 Ninefold Ventures LLC, d/b/a 6-Lab. All rights reserved.
© 2026 Ninefold Ventures LLC, d/b/a 6-Lab. All rights reserved.
That grid of selectable game tiles isn't just for show. On Ultimate X, multipliers earned on one hand of video poker roll into the next, which is exactly why players go looking for machines someone else just walked away from.
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Game King is IGT's long-running multi-game platform, first released in 1996 and still found on casino floors today in several cabinet generations. Instead of one fixed game, Game King presents a touchscreen menu of selectable titles -- video poker variants most prominently -- accessed through a signature blue or purple grid layout. Its most talked-about variant is Ultimate X, a video poker format where multipliers earned on one hand can carry forward into the next, a design detail that's spawned its own corner of slot-floor culture.
IGT released Game King in 1996, and the cabinet family has stuck around long enough to appear in several physical formats: classic upright and slant-top cabinets, modern bartop units like the G20, PeakBarTop, and CrystalFlex, and the newer CrystalDual 27. The common thread across all of them is the touchscreen game-selection grid and a button deck with backlit mechanical buttons, including the five dedicated hold buttons that video poker players expect.
Most video poker games evaluate each hand in isolation. Ultimate X changes that by letting multipliers earned on a winning hand roll forward and apply to the next hand dealt, creating a chain of elevated payouts that can build up over a session. That persistent-multiplier idea is unusual enough in the video poker world that it's become one of the more recognizable features tied to the Game King name specifically, distinct from the dozens of other poker variants housed on the same cabinet.
Because Ultimate X multipliers can persist on a machine after a player walks away, a documented slice of slot-floor culture has grown up around actively searching casinos for Game King machines that a previous player left in an elevated multiplier state, rather than starting a session from scratch. Wizard of Odds has written about this behavior, and players who do it are informally known in the community as "vultures." It's a real, publicly discussed pattern rather than an urban legend -- though what exactly makes a given machine worth pursuing is a more involved question than this preview covers.
Game King has shipped in upright, slant-top, and bartop configurations (G20, PeakBarTop, CrystalFlex), plus the newer CrystalDual 27 dual-screen unit -- so the exact look of the cabinet you're standing in front of can vary quite a bit even though it's running the same underlying platform. An online version of Game King Video Poker also exists, with a reported RTP range of roughly 97.8% to 99.2% -- a figure that describes the online product specifically and shouldn't be assumed to match any particular physical cabinet's payout setting.
More games you can identify the same way, from a single photo.