Whacked

What is Whacked?

Early Monday, Sept. 14, police tracked phones linked to the men to BB’s B.F.E. Bar & Grill in Latham, roughly 25 miles northwest of Decatur.

The Logan County Sheriff’s Office responded to check the venue and confirmed a break-in: power to the building had been cut, an ATM opened, and multiple video gaming terminals smashed and emptied of cash, according to affidavits.

Heckman and Ziemer were arrested later that morning. Subsequent searches uncovered burglary tools, gaming-machine cash boxes, a stolen Hyundai that had allegedly been repainted from red to black, and other stolen equipment, according to police.

How to play Whacked

Yashin had spent around 15 years building businesses across industries ranging from fashion technology and retail hardware to sneaker cleaning, as well as investing in early-stage technology companies. Yet when he attempted to place a football bet, he found the interface so impenetrable that he eventually headed to a betting shop to ask how to do it.

When he subsequently looked at casino games, something else struck him – the experience did not seem dramatically different from the slot machines he remembered seeing years earlier.

“I started thinking about how to combine the really great monetisation of randomness in casino games with the attention loop of social media platforms,” Yashin says. “The idea was: what if you could bet on the result of a short video or a short TikTok?”

About Whacked

the studio took two of its most recognizable characters and brought them together

BGaming’s product chief tied the release directly to prior results. Julia Alekseeva, CPO at BGaming, said duel slots have proven to be a hit in the past, with titles like Clash of Gods Power Duel driving strong engagement, so the studio decided to take this further with Johnny vs Chicken. She added that the studio took two of its most recognizable characters and brought them together in what she called the ultimate BGaming IP showdown.

That language, an “IP showdown” between established characters, points to where the strategy could go next. If a duel format plus familiar faces reliably lifts engagement, BGaming has a repeatable template for future crossovers drawn entirely from its own library. Johnny vs Chicken reads less like a finished idea. It reads more like a first test of a shared-universe approach to slot IP.