You’re on the tail end of an evening flight to visit Las Vegas for the first time. After hours of soaring over sparsely illuminated desert, your plane finally descends over Lake Mead as a sea of neon suddenly emerges on the horizon.
When you deboard, the first thing you see are clusters of slot machines scattered throughout Harry Reid International Airport. They’re different than the traditional mechanical slots you’ve seen in movies, with massive screens and endless bells and whistles.
While the 1,400 machines at the airport may seem a bit excessive, they’re actually just a tiny chunk of the 107,757 games that can be found throughout the whole of Clark County. Many more await at your chosen resort, where you’ll peruse hundreds of titles before finding one that piques your interest.
It’s a flashy sensory overload like you’ve never experienced. You win some and lose slightly more, but the outcome pales in comparison to your own creeping curiosity. Where exactly do all these machines come from?
With the Global Gaming Expo (G2E) industry event returning to the Las Vegas Strip this week—October 6-9 at Venetian—the Weekly takes you behind the scenes to get the inside scoop on that exact question.
NUTS, BOLTS, BELLS & BARS
Our journey through the slot machine’s lifespan begins at Aristocrat Gaming’s 389,500-square-foot Las Vegas Integration Center (LVIC) campus in Henderson. Opening last fall and now home to 200 of the Australian company’s 1,200 Valley-based employees, the facility doubled production capabilities in a space that spans the size of seven football fields.
Gaming machines at Aristocrat’s Henderson facility
Here, floor assembly workers shuffle across 12 production lines with five to eight stations each, while programmers and graphic artists plug away in adjacent workshops. All in all, they’re collectively tasked with piecing together everything that’s needed for each of Aristocrat’s 14 physical slot machine models, better known as cabinets. From there, quality assurance pros test the final products before a spinning robot wraps them up for added protection during shipping.
“We have materials flown in from our suppliers from all around the world. When it comes here, we do what we call integration,” chief supply chain officer Deanne McKissick says, motioning to several dozen massive warehouse shelving units. “For a cabinet, we start with a big core piece of metal. We then put on the monitor, the button deck, the toppers, and get it ready for the end customer before it goes on to ground transportation.”
Finished Aristocrat electronic gaming machines—EGMs—can weigh between 300 and 665 pounds and stand six to nine feet tall. Everything is made-to-order for each casino operator.
“We have two parts of our business. In one, we’ll maintain ownership of the cabinets and service them ourselves. Or a property can buy the cabinet and game and do their own maintenance,” McKissick explains. “Percentage-wise, it’s still mostly buy. I want to say the big casinos own about 80%. But the properties will have a budget for both, and they often buy or order on different schedules.”
A machine will typically remain on a casino floor for about 20 years, McKissick adds, but the game it hosts can change over time.
“You can put different discs into your Xbox to play different games, and the same thing is true on a slot machine. We typically ship it with a game, but we can also do what we call a conversion, where we’ll burn another game to replace the old one,” McKissick says.
Cabinets and games are all exclusive Aristocrat technologies and intellectual properties, but the finishing touches for each unit are determined by the purchaser.
“A lot of them will standardize their own look and feel through what’s called a laminate. We and all our competitors use the same laminates—it could be a lighter wood, a gray or a red, depending on the customer—and I think there are over 200 varieties in total,” McKissick says.
PULLING THE LEVERS
A new game has quite a journey ahead of it before it can even reach the manufacturing stage. The industry has almost entirely moved away from traditional coin-operated, reel and lever-based machines in favor of large touchscreen monitors and cashless betting, leading to a greater variety and complexity of offerings.
At the UNLV International Gaming Institute’s Center for Gaming Innovation, program director Daniel Sahl has spent the last 11 years preparing the next generation of slot innovators for this relatively recent shift.
“When you look at the machines today, some would say they look substantially different, but even though they’ve evolved, that fundamental concept of symbols aligning on a pay line to get a winning outcome remains tried and tested,” Sahl says. “What I say to my students is, don’t ignore what works, because it’s worked for a very long time.
“The question then becomes, how do we make an alteration or innovation that builds off what we know works and is fun, but also adds a new twist or level of excitement for the players? I wish I knew what that secret sauce was.”
G2E will allow many of Sahl’s pupils to attend free of charge, where they’ll soak in exciting industry developments that will include roughly 160 new Aristocrat titles. According to Matthew Primmer, chief product officer, each new Aristocrat concept is completely developed in-house across 12 studios, by teams ranging from 35 to 250 employees.
“We design the way the cabinet looks and do all the engineering and manufacturing,” Primmer says. “From a game standpoint, we also build the operating system that they all run on, and each game is like a different app. All the colors, graphics and sounds are hand-drawn or recorded by artists, animators, internal musicians and software and sound engineers.”
Some games begin as original intellectual properties, while others spawn from licensed collaborations with influential franchises like HBO’s Game of Thrones, Hasbro’s Monopoly, and even the NFL.
In the former group is Dragon Link, which launched in 2016 and has since become “probably the most successful game in the market,” according to Primmer. “There’s a lot of nuance to it, but it’s also very simple and is easy to understand. I think a big part of it is that what you see is what you get. It’s a little bit like playing tables, where they don’t hide the money.”
On the other end of the spectrum, licenses with major media franchises help bring in new players by merging familiar characters and stories with a “slight iteration” of that world that can include, as explored through that game’s unique winning animations, bonus rounds and artistic direction.
“For most people, if you’ve watched a series like Game of Thrones, you’ve probably watched them all. So, how do you show someone who’s watched every episode something really cool and different? We love those sorts of challenges,” Primmer says.
OUT FOR A SPIN
Aristocrat’s The Baron slot machine
Aside from the initial technical processes of determining a game’s principal functions and mathematics, the craft of successfully fusing those factors with a seamless game world lies in the hands of creatives.
Former Aristocrat graphic artist Joyce Rainbow recalls working on everything from in-game illustrations to chair artwork for titles like Buffalo Grand and The Walking Dead with its Studio 54 team from 2014 to 2019.
“Something very interesting about what I learned in that role was that we aim to tell a story, and the story component always comes with the player’s goals,” Rainbow says. “Maybe you’re chasing a jackpot, or trying to get three symbols aligned to win a free spin. Along the way, the background will physically change, and you’ll be taken to a different, unique location in that game.”
Rainbow’s job entailed far more than just sketches and symbols. As her team developed The Walking Dead slot game, her role included watching episodes over and over to pick out clips for win sequences.
“Going back to that storytelling aspect, we wanted to make sure that the higher the reward the player earns, the more of a treat that they got, something really flashy and very entertaining,” she says. “We even designed the lighting effects on the cabinets to match the colors of the artwork on the screen, especially if there’s a win celebration.”
Her studio also “got really good at designing gold,” she adds with a laugh. “There were also a lot of bright, saturated colors and particle systems, which generate the sparkle animations and other effects you’ll see that really attract people to play.”
Artists are also encouraged to source inspiration from the real world, whenever possible.
“If we saw something that’s external that we can take pictures of and bring in new textures and flavors to the game, we’d do it,” Rainbow says. “If there’s a game with some exotic animals, we’ll go to a zoo to study their animation behaviors.”
In general, convincing world-building is a foundational part of the experience. To ensure that their characters are “as lifelike as possible,” Primmer says studios will often utilize modern technology like green screens.
“You’ve got to get them into the story and quickly understanding what they’re trying to achieve and why they should care about whatever the character is,” Primmer says.
These factors all came together in Aristocrat’s flagship Buffalo series, which debuted in 2007 and has since encompassed 30 sequel releases—or what the industry refers to as “derivatives.” Primmer says the original game “really took off in Nevada before anywhere else,” which helped Aristocrat become a big fish in the industry.
“We study buffalo to get the movements right to make them feel true, and the well-known call where he yells out ‘Buffalo’ was also created in-house. One of our employees couldn’t get the right sound, so he just made it himself,” Primmer says. “It’s been yelled millions of times now, and we actually just got that registered as an audio trademark.”
BONUS ROUNDS
After a game is coded and the cabinet is assembled and shipped, the players themselves largely have the final say on that title’s future. When a successful new entry like Buffalo is created by Aristocrat—or competitors like Konami Gaming—it’ll likely yield many subsequent sequel releases.
Konami president and UNLV alum Tom Jingoli expects to see one of the titles his company will debut at G2E—a new slot game called Money in the Bank—follow a similar trajectory.
“When we develop a new game, we call it a parent. So, you’ll have a parent title like Money in the Bank, and then there will also be derivatives that you can release underneath it that are really critical to the success of that game,” Jingoli explains. “The safe time to develop a parent is probably a one-year cycle, but the derivatives should take at least half that amount of time for deployment and approval.”
In an industry where rival companies scramble to differentiate themselves in a largely static platform like slots, a fresh and exciting take will also frequently draw imitators.
“It’s really a copycat industry. When somebody comes up with a concept, everybody else will kind of knock it off, provided there are no patent or IP rights around that,” Jingoli says. “That’s why, when you go into a casino, a lot of games will have the same types of features on them, but will all do things just a little bit differently,”
For Sahl, the result of this incremental innovation and subsequent emulation is best gauged on the casino floors.
“Every now and then, you do see a sort of bold new pattern that can be revealed over time to players. It’s a bit of a change, and sometimes that really sticks with the player. When that happens, you’ll know, because you’ll see newer machines adopting more of those designs,” Sahl says.
In what Jingoli describes as a “relatively flat” market, being the first to unveil a quality variation on an established concept like slots is everything.
“While there are a few new territories and markets that are coming online, in general, there’s not a whole lot of expansion and growth going on right now,” he says. “For us, the way we typically grow is by having a superior product. We gain market share by placing more products on our floor than our competitors—and that’s a direct result of product performance.”
PAYOUTS
G2E vice president Korbi Carrison says the convention has been “home to almost every exciting announcement around slot machines and their innovation” since its inception in 2001. This year, it’ll host global industry leaders from 120 countries and territories.
“Bringing slot technology to a casino floor is a multi-layered process. From cabinet development to building out payout percentages and even the machine’s animation, every detail is meticulously planned. We apply that same care when building out G2E’s offerings,” Carrison says.
For McKissick, this “opportunity to bring customers in from all around the world” is akin to “the Super Bowl of gaming.”
And while the four-day affair is paramount to success, Primmer adds that it’s still just one major stepping stone to the end goal of delivering an “enjoyable entertainment experience” for casino floors in Las Vegas and everywhere else.
“There are a lot of people who’ve played slot machines for a long time and know what they like, and there are a lot of others who just want to explore,” Primmer says. “One thing we know about all players is that they don’t like to be told what to do. For us, while we sell to the casinos, the players are the ones who make the decisions as to what’s popular. We need to get them excited to sit in front of a game and continue to delight them enough that they’ll come back.”
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