In December 1996 the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 21 November as World Television Day. This was a contentious decision, deemed by many as unnecessary. But the idiot box does rule our lives in many different ways. The leading games suppliers to online casinos have developed branded slots based on popular television serials. This article looks at two of them.

Game of Thrones is beyond doubt the hottest television serial of all time. It was first aired in April 2011 and the final season will be in 2019. Microgaming has released the Game of Thrones video slot in two versions. One has 243 ways to win and the other has 15 paylines. The video slot is lacking the action and fire of the television series. None of the characters appear as symbols on the reels, probably because they have short life spans in the story. Both versions of the branded video slot have the same set of symbols. The emblems of four of Baratheon, Lannister, Stark and Targarten, which are the aristocratic families in the serisl, appear as the high paying symbols. The Game of Thrones logo is a stacked wild symbol. The Iron Throne is the scatter symbol. It awards payouts multiplied by the total bet and triggers the free games feature. Each House offers a set of free games and you can pick one of them. Offers with more free spins have smaller multipliers so you choose between low and high volatility. The emblem of each House appears stacked in its own free games.

The X-Files is an American science fiction drama television series that originally aired from 1993 to 2002. Playtech has created a branded video slot based on the 2008 revival subtitled I Want to Believe. The protagonists are FBI special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully who investigate the unsolved cases involving paranormal phenomena. They are the highest paying symbols. The other thematic symbols are Alien hand, torchlight and silhouette figures. The usual playing card icons are the low paying symbols. The wild symbol is a multiplier that takes random values up to 5x. The UFO is the scatter symbol that triggers the Locking Rift free spins feature. You can win up to 20 free spins depending on the number of scatter symbols in the trigger. Big payouts come from the locked wild multipliers in the free spins.