Pelican Pete pokies are Aristocrat’s game about a cartoon pelican in a captain’s hat, on MK6 cabinets in NSW and the ACT from 2004. It runs 50 lines on a five-by-four window, and in the free games every pelican wild that lands stays put until the round ends. The online version returns 94.94%, and a 2025 Cash Express remake followed. The free demo below is a similar seaside pokie.
Pelican Pete uses five reels and four rows with 50 paylines that pay left to right. On the club and pub machine you choose 1, 12, 25, 38 or 50 lines and bet 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10 credits a line, so a spin costs from 1 to 500 credits; a 25-credit variant exists where one credit buys two lines. Online, most operators fix all 50 lines, and published bet limits vary from site to site. The online return to player is 94.94%, with one review site also printing 94.76%; the land-based percentage is set by the venue and has not been published for this title. Volatility is medium by consensus and the hit rate is not published. There is no official maximum win: the top line pays 100 times the line bet for five Sunsets, and the larger figures quoted online, from 400x to 1,000x and 10,000 credits, do not agree with each other.
Pelican Pete Pokies Characteristics
Wins need matching symbols on consecutive reels from the left; the Sunset, Fish and Treasure Chest pay from two of a kind, everything else needs three. The wild is Pelican Pete himself. He appears on reels 2, 3, 4 and 5 only, never on reel 1, substitutes for every symbol except the Lighthouse, has no pay of his own and neither stacks nor expands. The Lighthouse is the scatter and lands on reels 1, 2 and 3 only; three of them pay a small scatter prize and start the free games. Some review sites have these reels reversed; the machine’s own rules text is clear.
There is no bonus buy, no respin and no progressive on the standard New South Wales and ACT machine. Beyond that there are the free games, a card gamble after any win and, online, autoplay of up to 25 rounds.
The figures below come from the original MK6 machine and are multiples of the line bet for two, three, four and five of a kind.
Three Lighthouses pay 4 on top of starting the free games; Aristocrat normally counts scatter pays against the total bet, though the rules text does not state the unit. Five Sunsets pay 100 times the line bet, only two times the total bet with all 50 lines running. The paytable is flat, every card symbol pays 50x for five, and the real money comes from many lines paying at once when the pelicans lock in. Claims of five Lighthouses paying 1,600 coins are impossible: the scatter only lands on three reels.
Three Lighthouses on reels 1, 2 and 3 award 10 free games. Any Pelican Pete wild that lands during the feature stays in its window position for the rest of it. As wilds accumulate on reels 2 to 5 more lines complete on every spin, though each line still needs reel 1 to deliver a matching symbol. There is no win multiplier, so the pelicans do all the work. One retrigger of five more games is possible, for a maximum of 15.
One reviewer of the online version put a typical round at 65 to 75 times the total bet; a round where the pelicans arrive late pays far less, and one where they fill reels 2 to 4 early pays across the whole window on every remaining spin.
After any win you can gamble on a playing card: red or black pays 2x, the suit pays 4x, and a wrong guess loses the stake. The MK6 machine also offers a half gamble, stops you after five consecutive wins, caps the gambled amount at $10,000 and will not let you gamble a progressive jackpot. Online builds keep the gamble, though at least one listing shows it switched off, so it depends on the operator.
At 94.94% the online game keeps about 5 cents of every dollar bet over the long run, about a point more than most modern online pokies. The pub figure is venue-set and not published, so do not assume it matches. Medium volatility with a 2x top line means small base-game wins arrive often and the free games carry the ceiling.
At 50 lines and 1 cent a line a spin costs 50 cents, so $25 buys 50 spins; at 5 cents a line it is $2.50 a spin and the same $25 lasts 10 spins. A feature round paying 70 times the total bet returns $35 at the lower stake and $175 at the higher one.
The 2004 release came in two forms. The New South Wales and ACT machine is the standalone game. Queensland received Pelican Pete Jackpot Carnival, the same game on Aristocrat’s linked-progressive system; its jackpot levels were never published. The online version appeared through OpenBet between 2012 and 2015 and keeps the same symbols and sticky-wild free games.
Aristocrat revived the name in 2025 with Cash Express Luxury Line Pelican Pete, a new land-based machine in the same Luxury Line group as Buffalo, 50 Lions and Timberwolf. Collecting lighthouse symbols lets you choose between Free Games and a Cash Express train ride, where red, green, blue and purple trains deliver 10 to 100 carriages carrying credit values or bet multipliers, a Gold Train acts as a repeater of up to 10x, and the wilds become sticky multiplier wilds. Lines, return and jackpot sizes are not published. Two siblings reuse the sticky-wild free games: Miss Kitty from 2006 and Harlequin Hearts from 2008.
The setting is an Australian harbour at sunset. Pete is a cartoon pelican in a captain’s hat with a beakful of gold coins, and the reels carry a golden sunset, a lighthouse, an anchor, a starfish, a treasure chest and a purple fish above nine-to-ace card symbols on a blue and purple ocean backdrop. The original ran at 640 by 480 on the MVP cabinet with simple 2004-era animation: classic Aristocrat rather than a showpiece. The ukulele tune, which speeds up in three stages through the free games, is the detail players remember. The online build started in Flash and is now described as HTML5 for phones and tablets.
Pelican Pete is first and foremost a club and pub machine: it shipped as an Australian MK6 title with a New South Wales and ACT set and a Queensland Jackpot Carnival set. Online is a different story. Aristocrat does not supply the offshore casinos that accept Australian players; its real-money online distribution went to regulated European operators through OpenBet from 2012 and, since 2022, to regulated US states such as New Jersey, and the company has said it would only enter Australian online casino if that market were legalised. None of the 18 Australian-facing casinos we checked could be confirmed to carry the game. Aristocrat publishes no official free demo, and many third-party free-play versions are the old Flash build and no longer load.
Pelican Pete suits players who like the Aristocrat formula of a flat paytable, lots of lines and one feature that carries the game. It is a poor fit for anyone chasing a big single-spin number: the top line is two times the total bet, there is no multiplier, and typical feature rounds are measured in tens of bets. The one thing to check is which version you are at: the online game pays 94.94%, the pub machine pays whatever the venue has set, and the 2025 remake is a different game with the same pelican on the glass.
The online version returns 94.94%, with one site also printing 94.76%. Club and pub machines run a venue-set percentage that is not published for this title.
Land three Lighthouse scatters at once. They only appear on reels 1, 2 and 3, and award 10 free games, with one retrigger of five more for a maximum of 15.
There is no official maximum. The top line pays 100 times the line bet for five Sunsets, and the larger figures quoted online, from 400x to 1,000x and 10,000 credits, do not agree.
Only during the free games. Every Pelican Pete wild that lands in the feature stays in that position until it ends; in the base game the wild lands on reels 2 to 5 and behaves normally.
Aristocrat supplies regulated markets only, and none of the offshore casinos accepting Australians that we checked could be confirmed to carry it. In Australia it is a land-based machine, and there is no official Aristocrat demo.
No, but it is a close relative. Miss Kitty (2006) and Harlequin Hearts (2008) are later Aristocrat titles built on the same sticky-wild free games, and the 2025 Cash Express Luxury Line Pelican Pete is a remake with a train feature and sticky multiplier wilds.
