Max Damage, the slot that Golden Riviera launched in November 2014

Golden Riviera Casino sent out the text below in November 2014 to announce Max Damage, a video slot by Microgaming that brought back the hero of an older "arcade" title (Max Damage and the Alien Attack), and it is kept here in the past tense because it shows how a casino of those years launched a space shooter on its reels, and what it forgot to tell.

A sequel announced for Wednesday, 5 November

The launch date was Wednesday, 5 November 2014, and the release promised "explosive entertainment", a meeting of "classic arcade styling" with what the copywriter called "modernized functionality". The sequel kept the spirit of the eighties that had made the first game a favourite, the text said, while adding sharper graphics, cleaner sound and the usual apparatus of a slot of 2014 (bonuses, free spins and cash prizes).

A representative of the casino, quoted but not named, declared himself "such a big fan" of the original that he expected the players to "love" the sequel, which is a casino speaking for its players before any of them had pressed the spin button. We print the words because they belong to the record, not because a fan at the casino proves anything about a game!

Five reels, 243 ways and a hero who fights back

Max Damage ran on five reels and had no paylines at all: its 243 "ways to win" meant that a symbol counted as soon as it appeared on consecutive reels from the left, in whatever row, and the hero himself served as the "wild", the symbol that replaced any other to complete a combination. Two "scatters" (symbols that paid or triggered a feature wherever they landed) did the rest of the work.

Three to five Alien scatters opened fifteen free spins at a multiplier of two, so that every win of the round was doubled, while the Enemy Spaceship scatters let Max "fight back" and collect random cash prizes, the second feature and the one that most recalled the arcade original. The release set the ceiling at 120,000.00, a figure printed without a currency and meant in coins, we suppose, the unit in which Microgaming counted its prizes then; whether anyone ever reached it, the text did not say.

$1,400 in three deposits, and what they cost

The welcome package advertised beside the game was worth up to $1,400 across three deposits (the same figures were printed in euro): the first deposit was matched in full (100 per cent) up to $150, the second by a quarter (25 per cent) up to $500 and the third by half (50 per cent) up to $750. It was the ladder that Golden Riviera leant against its slot tournaments of that November, as other texts of this archive show.

The headline said nothing about the outlay. Reaching the three ceilings meant depositing $150, then $2,000 (of which a quarter makes the $500) and then $1,500 (of which a half makes the $750), that is $3,650 of the player's own money against $1,400 of credits. The "wagering" (how many times deposit and bonus had to be staked before a cashout) went unmentioned, though it alone told you what the $1,400 was worth.

The catalogue, the cashier and the helpline, as the release listed them

Around the game came the usual claims of the house: a catalogue of more than 650 titles, all from Microgaming and growing month by month, a cashier that took credit cards and "web wallets" in several currencies, and a multilingual helpline open at every hour by live chat, e-mail and a toll-free number.

Golden Riviera was never tested by us, in 2014 or since; the lines above are the casino's claims and not our findings, and a page that records a launch is not the place to check them.

Golden Riviera, Platinum Play and the game, twelve years on

Golden Riviera sat in the stable that the trade knew as Vegas Partner Lounge (Maple Casino, Casino-Mate and Crazy Vegas were the other brands), and none of the four is listed on this site. The address it used then displayed, when this page was updated, a directory of casinos aimed at American players and no casino at all; the ladder of $1,400 survives nowhere, which makes the figures above a testimony and not an offer.

Each screenshot of Max Damage opens Platinum Play (the link is sponsored, as the disclosure box states), a casino that ran the same Microgaming games in 2014 under different owners and that we still list in 2026. Nothing of the $1,400 belonged to it. What it offers now is set out in our review of Platinum Play, the fruit of a "demo" session and not of a deposit.

Microgaming itself no longer publishes the game: its games business became Games Global across 2021 and 2022 (the change is told in our page on Microgaming becoming Apricot), so that Max Damage, wherever it still spins, carries the Games Global name. The offers of 2026 are on the world list of bonuses without deposit, if you want to compare them. The slots we have played in "demo" are gathered in the slot hub.

The Red Hot Devil release of the same house sits beside this one in the news archive. A reader who sets the two texts side by side, a year apart, finds the same $1,400, the same adjectives and the same missing multiple, which is the figure you should look for first in any release. What they left out, this page adds.

By the Online-Casinos.ws editorial team · Online since 2002 · Last updated: 9 October 2026