A success story in 171 games

30 years of scratch-off tickets – that’s a long string of incredible figures for the “small, colourful little tickets” that were initially sold by the metre.

Austrian Lotteries has another anniversary to celebrate: 30 years ago, they launched their first scratch-off ticket series. Fingernails, coins, key rings or specially designed scratching instruments – from February 27 of 1995, these were the tools needed to win a quick prize at your local retail outlets. This is the day the first scratch-off tickets were sold over the counter. Not individually, but by the metre: “Three metres of the red ones and two metres of the yellow ones” was a common thing to hear in retail outlets. It began with the games “Cash” and “Schatztruhe” (“Treasure Chest”) and soon developed into an undeniable success.

Over the past 30 years, 171 different scratch-off ticket games were launched: From “Ach du dickes Ei” (simply untranslatable) to “Wir sind Österreich” (“We Are Austria”), from “Aladins Schätze” (“Aladdin’s Treasure”) to “Winterzauber” (“Winter Magic”). A total of 483 series were produced around these 171 games. This represents just over 2.7 billion (2,704,053,000, to be precise) individual tickets. If you laid all these tickets side by side, they would cover an area of 18 square kilometres – enough to cover Vienna’s districts 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 15, or the Mondsee Lake in Upper Austria and Lake Zell in Salzburg combined. Laid end to end, the scratch-off tickets would stretch to an impressive 180,500 km, meaning they could circle the Earth four and a half times at the equator.

Let’s not forget that the scratch-off ticket has long been available in an electronic version on win2day. For 20 years, the mouse has also been used as a scratching instrument.