Thunder Express

How to play Thunder Express

The one genuinely new seasonal wrinkle is a pumpkin symbol. It can land during free spins to award mid-bonus upgrades, layered on top of the ante bet and feature-buy options already familiar across the range. For an experienced Big Bass player, the proposition is deliberately recognizable rather than reinvented.

The value of this release lies in what it says about franchise strategy. The Big Bass series has become one of Pragmatic Play’s most reliable engines, and reskinning a proven math model with seasonal theming is a low-risk way to keep the brand visible during a commercially significant window.

Halloween is a natural peg for that approach. It gives operators a topical, franchise-branded title to feature in October promotions without asking players to learn a new system. The friendly Count Dracula fisherman and trick-or-treat trimmings supply the seasonal hook while the underlying fish-collection loop does the heavy lifting.

About Thunder Express

The logic is simple. A 75‑minute loop that people willingly sit through more than once needs fresh experiences. So, the world’s most technologically advanced theater just made itself more technologically advanced.

It’s still the same movie experience—just with more of the room participating.

These six additions sit on top of the effects that have been running since opening day on Aug. 28, 2025: tornado winds, swirling debris, fog, haptic seats, fire bursts, falling apples, and the flying monkeys version 1.0.

This is the marquee upgrade. In 2025, it was enough for physical monkeys to appear to fly off the screen and over your head. But more than 3.6 million people have already seen that stupid pet trick. The first-gen monkeys were 16-foot helium inflatables steered by drone operators. Their only motion, besides drifting forward, was wing-flapping. They floated more than they performed.

About Thunder Express

“The bottleneck becomes the person reviewing everything. That does not mean we never review the code itself. For sensitive or critical parts of the system, we still look more closely at the implementation, particularly from an architecture, performance, security and reliability perspective. But we no longer apply that level of manual code review to everything.” Grenstad says.

The shift to AI is also changing how Grenstad thinks about recruitment. A team working on the player journey, for example, needs people who understand casinos, iGaming and what a strong player experience should look like.

“I would not necessarily prioritise senior Java or front-end specialists in the same way as before,” Grenstad explains. “Technical skills remain important, particularly for people who can assess architecture and ensure systems remain reliable, but domain knowledge is becoming increasingly valuable. I’d rather take someone who’s good in the domain but doesn’t know any Java.”