ALEXANDRIA, Va., Jan. 28 -- United States Patent no. 12,536,877, issued on Jan. 27, was assigned to Aristocrat Technologies Inc. (Las Vegas).
"Gaming method and apparatus using cluster based awards" was invented by Ryan Paul Hawkins (Henderson, Nev.), Yanis Tsombanidis (Las Vegas), Stephanie Johns (Las Vegas) and Robert Honeycutt (Henderson, Nev.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The present invention relates to gaming machines, systems and methods of gaming. There are a number of different ways available for determining an award by current gaming machines and systems. In this embodiment, a game controller is arranged to determine an award depending on the number of columns spanned by a cluster ...