A $70,000 win on Gold Factory at Golden Riviera, just before Christmas 2014
This article was written in 2014 and we keep it as a record of how the online casinos of that time presented their games and promotions. The operators, offers and figures it mentions may no longer exist or may have changed, and nothing on this page is a current offer. 18+.
This article was first published in December 2014, when Golden Riviera, a casino of the Vegas Partner Lounge group that no longer operates under that name, announced that an Australian player known as C.H. had won "over $70,000" on Gold Factory (a video slot of Microgaming) on 11 December, "a very fortuitous start to the festive season". We keep it as a record of how a win was told then.
The copy of the text on this page carried the name of Platinum Play instead of Golden Riviera, since the images had been made to link to that casino when Golden Riviera stopped operating under its name, while the address of the page and our archive (which lists it so) kept the original, which we restore here. The win, the slot and the offer belong to Golden Riviera, as the release said.
What the casino announced
Gold Factory, the release said, was "a game title that comes up more than most" in the history of big wins at the casino, and C.H. had found his fortune there on 11 December 2014 (a Thursday), which is all the text said about him, apart from "the New Year champagne" he was expected to pop early. His stake was not given, and the stake is half the story.
On a slot with fifty paylines the arithmetic is simple: at $1 a line a spin costs $50 and a win of $70,000 is worth 1,400 spins, while at one cent a line (fifty cents a spin) the same win is worth 140,000 spins! A release that gives the prize without the stake gives you a number, not a story.
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How the game was built
Gold Factory was a video slot with five reels and fifty paylines (a 5x3 grid), set in a factory where "cartoonish carts" filled with gold bars and coins rolled past and liquid gold poured into moulds, so that "the fortunes are tangible", as the release put it, which is what every slot promises. Its highlight was a multi-level bonus, triggered by three or more Gold Bonus coins anywhere on the reels.
The first level was the "Boiler Room Bonus", a pick in which the right choice opened one of two doors: the "Reactor Bonus", where the player kept picking items that held random awards until the reactor malfunctioned, or the "Free Spins Bonus", with free spins (10 to 35) and a multiplier of two on every win. Every award of the reactor was random, as the release said with unusual candour.
A bonus of the kind changes the rhythm of a slot and the size of its best days, not the theoretical return printed in the help panel (the "RTP"), which already includes the free spins and the reactor; the release said nothing of the return, and it is worth opening the help panel before the first spin. The panel is where a review starts.
The welcome offer of the time, and its arithmetic
New players were offered up to $1,400 over the first three deposits (the casino also quoted the figures in euro): 100 per cent up to $150 on the first, 25 per cent up to $500 on the second and 50 per cent up to $750 on the third. Thirty "free spins" on the Game of Thrones slot, launched by Microgaming under licence that year, completed the package.
A player who wanted all of the $1,400 had to put down $3,650 of his own (150 for the first tier, 2,000 for the second, 1,500 for the third); 25 per cent reaches $500 only at $2,000, and half reaches $750 only at $1,500. The "wagering" (the volume of bets required before a withdrawal) was in the terms, which nobody can read today.
The rest of the release was the boilerplate of the group, with more than 650 games by Microgaming on a download software, the eCOGRA seal ("a big deal in the industry", it said), a banking page from credit cards to web wallets under "128-bit SSL" encryption and a support team around the clock. We report the claims as the casino made them, since we never tested Golden Riviera.
Seen from 2026
Golden Riviera belonged to Vegas Partner Lounge with Crazy Vegas, Casino-Mate and Maple Casino, Microgaming casinos which no longer operate under those names, and none is among the operators we work with, so that the package of $1,400 and the thirty spins no longer exist. Gold Factory passed with Microgaming's catalogue to Games Global (2021-2022), and the same slot hosted the Crazy Vegas freeroll of January 2015.
The images on this page link to Platinum Play, a Microgaming casino of those years and of another group, still among those we present (the link is an affiliate link, as the box above says), whose review tells how we tried it in demo mode and what its package is now, if you want to compare. The win and the offer above were never its own, whatever the old page said.
Wins of $70,000 are announced because they are rare, and the offer attached was the price of the publicity; the wagering of any welcome package is worth reading before its headline, whatever you are offered, as our world list of no deposit bonuses and the free spins page do today. The other announcements of that December, among them Santa Paws (the Christmas game of the same casino), are kept in our news archive.
By the Online-Casinos.ws editorial team · Online since 2002 · Last updated: 9 October 2026