Microgaming’s “Prime Property” seems at first glance to be a completely innocent little slot about… People selling real estate. So thrilling, right? Why make a slot about, I don’t know, superheroes, space battles or fantasy when you can roll symbols of folks trying to sell you real estate? Can you imagine working in real estate, and then coming back to play a slot about property? That must be the very definition of Hell itself! But wait a minute… Why WOULD Microgaming make that kind of slot, anyway? Did they just randomly pull the idea out of a hat, or is there something more to it, something hiding under the hood? Well, hang on tight, dear reader, because I’m going to blow your mind.

The secret to understanding this slot lies, of course, in its artstyle. The heads of the people selling you this prime property are huge, deformed, cartoonish and, honestly, a bit disturbing. They’re more caricatures than real people, their faces too odd and weird even by slot standards. And, well, there’s a good reason for that – this particular style of super deformed heads is commonly associated with political cartoons.

Political cartoons haven’t always looked like that, mind you. They’ve got a pretty long history, and for most of that they had adopted a rather realistic style that’s closer to our world than whatever cartoony reality these modern images come from. It wasn’t until the 1940s when they finally adopted their own, distinctive style, courtesy of a certain someone you might know as Dr. Seuss. Theodor Seuss is the guy who brought you classic children’s books like “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” and “The Cat in the Hat”. Believe it or not, his work in the early 1940s became rather politically charged, which makes sense considering the fact that a certain bad apple was causing a bit of trouble in Europe.

Dr. Seuss has always drawn his characters in a very distinctive style, with large, deformed heads, prominent facial features and smaller bodies. Which, honestly, made sense, as he rarely drew humans at all – his characters were all fantasy creatures and animals. But when his “Adolf the Wolf” cartoon hit papers, the world of political sketches changed forever. Gradually, artists adopted this style and continued to exaggerate it further and further, leading to the cartoons of today which feature characters that barely even look human, with large heads and facial features. Today, political cartoons can be found in papers and especially online, where they thrived and found a new life.

So that brings us back to the question of “Prime Property”. Why would a slot about selling property possibly adopt the style of political cartoons? The only valid reason I can think of is that it’s trying to convey a political statement… And when you look at the time during which the slot was released, you’ll quickly realize what that statement is. In 2008, the American housing bubble burst, leading to one of the worst recessions for the country in recent memory. To make a very complicated matter as simple as possible, the overwhelming demand for new houses led to an inflation of prices, which, in turn, led to people no longer buying houses, crashing the market and causing an economic imbalance. “Prime Property” came out in 2010, smack-dab in the middle of the recession, and the fact that it depicts smiling, grinning real estate agents trying to sell you property can’t be a coincidence. The slot is satire, a political statement about the state of the housing market following the burst of the bubble. It depicts the struggles of real estate salesmen to get their “prime property” sold in the midst of a terrible economic crisis. Their huge, exaggerated grins are mere masks, to hide the fact that they’re trying to sell you ridiculously overpriced real estate in order to just feed. And the fact that this whole thing comes packaged as a slot – a piece of art that’s inherently connected to money – makes it pretty damn brilliant.