Innovative Casino Machine Designers Thriving

Thanks to Wired for their article discussing the success of ex-arcade designers in the casino machine business. The article focuses on Larry DeMar, once the co-creator of classic arcade titles such as Robotron, Defender, and Stargate, but now producing innovative video poker games such as Multi-Strike which "..add an element of fun to machines that traditionally have been routine gambling devices." According to industry executive Joe Kaminkow, "By making a game entertaining, you can enhance the wins and soften the losses for your players. You learn to give your players good cookies - things that are fun and exciting. Good designers understand how to dole out those cookies in just the right amount." Since a top-selling game "can reap more than $1 million per month in royalties for its creator", gambling machine design is a bigger business than many might think.

Comments

Captain Obvious Strikes Again!

[Violet Null]

Wonder why it took so long. Any arcade game designer knows that if your game is fun, there are people who will be willing to pump quarters into it all day long for a zero percent return on their investment. Given that, actually getting something back, even if it's only thirty percent of what you put in, would seem to just be an additional draw.

Re:Captain Obvious Strikes Again!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that most 'fun' games are skill based, and you can't have a casino game, that is skill based. Unskilled players will lose to much money, and therefore stop playing, while skilled players will win to much.

Re:Captain Obvious Strikes Again!

[Violet Null]

Just because a game accounts for skill doesn't mean it's based entirely on skill. You can easily have a game that is part skill, and still have the majority be luck driven (such as, say, poker).

Unskilled people play arcade games and lose money, so there's no reason as to why they wouldn't play a game that would occasionally give them some money back. As for skilled people, you just need to make sure that luck is enough of a force to keep the skilled player from being able to consistently beat the machine. That would involve making the game "unfair", but, hey, it pays money out occasionally.

Re:Captain Obvious Strikes Again!

[cafall]

> and you can't have a casino game, that is skill based.

Au contraire. Reel machines are definitely what some might call "luck based", but many casino games are skill based. Video poker (incl. all those 50- or 100-Play poker machines, as well as blackjack are all skill-based, where a player's decisions can increase or decrease their chances and, therefore, pay.

And next time you look at some poker machines, notice how the win amounts drop as your chances of getting them increase. E.g., a 4-of-a-Kind pays significantly more in vanilla Poker than it does in a "Deuces and Jokers Wild" game. Manipulating win amounts is how manufactures can maintain yield percentages while varying play dynamics.

DeMar co-creator of Defender? I think not!

[Viol8]

"Larry DeMar, once the co-creator of classic arcade "

I don't know about Robotron or Stargate but calling DeMar a "co-creator" for Defender is pushing it a bit.
All he did was help out Eugene Jarvis iron out the bugs towards the end of Defenders development along with a lot of other people at
Williams. It was Jarvis and sound man Sam Dicker who did all the hard work pushing the concept through and writing the code!

slot machines aren't luck driven

[DrSkwid]

They don't run rand() to see if you win.

The patterns are pre-programmed so that the ratio of win to lose (which is legally mandated - in the UK at least, presumably other countries that issue gambling licences will have similar legislation) is constant over a particular time period.

A manufacturer can tell it's customers how much money the machine will make during it's lifetime.

The BBC has a story about it

I was asked to make an internet slot machine and was given documentation on the general principlies.

Re:slot machines aren't luck driven

[ichimunki]

By pre-programmed I assume you mean that you set up a scrambled list of possible outcomes (using the same unscrambled list each time) and then pop an entry from the list until the list is gone. The scrambled list will be different each time, but the same amount of payoffs will happen each cycle. Long enough cycle time with enough redundancies in the payoff list and no one could possibly tell when a cycle started or track when a payoff was "due" (by "due" I mean the cycle was almost complete and the larger payoffs had not yet been used).

Re:slot machines aren't luck driven

[kasparov]

Perhaps in the U.K., but from the info I can find about U.S. machines they do use a random number generator as opposed to a pre-determined script of outcomes. For an overview check out: How Slot Machine's Work.

What I really want to know is what kind of royalties do game designers get from the casino? Do the basically lease the machine? Do the designers get a cut of the proceeds? Considering a good run of machines is about 500 units, they've got to be doing something other than selling them to make their money.

Re:slot machines aren't luck driven

[Thing 1]

Here in the states they print the payout on the machine -- it's generally between 92-97% (in other words, over a long period of time, the machine will consume 3-8% of the money that's deposited in it).

When you go gambling, make sure you look for the payout percentage, because (obviously) you're better off playing the 97% machine than the 92% machine.

Re:slot machines aren't luck driven

[cafall]

Yes and no. Gaming machines such as those in Las Vegas and Atlantic City do not have preprogrammed patterns. Slot machine outcomes in these machines are determined by pulling a reel index from the RNG; each reel is chosen independently. Most international jurisdictions also work this way.

Manufacturers are able to predict (but not guarantee) yield and hold percentages (based on monies inserted, not length of time in play; it's the casino's job to get people in to play them) by calculating the probability of each combination/permutation over a certain (large) number of "pulls". (You remember probability and permutations from pre-calc and/or statistics, right?)

OTOH, some US lottery jurisdictions and possibly more international jurisdictions operate in the same manner as the UK "fruit machines" mentioned above, but this is not the standard.

Re:slot machines aren't luck driven

[NickDngr]

What I really want to know is what kind of royalties do game designers get from the casino? Do the basically lease the machine? Do the designers get a cut of the proceeds?

Depends on the game. Multi-strike Poker (mentioned above) costs my casino $15 per day per machine to have on the floor. Some titles cost up to $65 per day. Some titles are a percentage of win, usually 80/20 or less, depending on the title. Percentage games are usually owned by the manufacturer, so there is no capital investment and maintenance is not the casino's resposibilty. How much of that actually goes to the designer I don't know. Those are fees we pay to machine's manufacturer. Also, only the most popular titles has a daily fee, most titles just have the initial purchase cost.

Re:slot machines aren't luck driven

[Bluetrust25]

When you go gambling, make sure you look for the payout percentage, because (obviously) you're better off playing the 97% machine than the 92% machine.

Where exactly do you find this? The past few times I've been to Vegas I never noticed a payout percentage printed on the machine!

Of course, I was drinking too. Maybe it's printed on the back of the machine.

but is it moral?

[cheezus]

Watching a senior citizen convert their entire social security check into nickels, then put it all in a slot machine is gut-wrenchingly depressing... I think I'd stick to turning kids into cold blooded killers by developing traditional video games.

Re:but is it moral?

[cafall]

Do you see anyone with a gun to aforementioned senior citizen's head? Gambling is a choice and simply one of the noisier and more colorful ways to blow a paycheck (or social security check).

Personally, I'd buy a better video card or anime. Neither directly contribute to my or society's well-being; they're just entertainment.

Having grown up in Nevada, USA, I think gambling is one of the most disgusting forms of entertainment, but I choose not to participate while all those people dropping coins keep me from having to pay state income tax.

It's what I like to call a symbiotic relationship. :)

take it from me...

[bigbigbison]

As a former casino employee I can attest that the most innovative thing about most slot machines is the licencing. At my old casino more and more slot machines were Austin Powers or I Dream of Jeanie, Monopoly, or Cassablanca. So in that way they were like pinball machines. The differenece is that, with the sole exception of the Austin Powers machine, all of the licences were things that had been around for over 20 years. No doubt it was because most of the suckers, err I mean customers, were at least 50 years of age.

I hear people say all the time, "Oh I just play the nickles" but nickle slot machines are the bread and butter of casinos. Our casino used to open at 9 am (its now 24 hours) and it was so funny to see the little old ladies push and elbow each other to get down to the nickle machines.

The thing people don't realize is that a lot of those machines you can play 90 nickles a spin. That's $4.50 a spin. How they get you is "Oh wow I won 40 tokens." but it took you 90 to get it and you won't even "win" that much on every spin.
I can still remember those damn machines. They crank the sound all the way up on them so if you worked in the cage like I did you got to listen to their stupid crap all night long. "Life of Luxury!" "Wow that was a good one!" "I've been waiting!" "That's a good one!" "Scratch and win!"

If you want to go to a casino, just give me your money and I'll kick you in the balls. Because that's how you're going to feel when you get done 9 times out of 10. Of course its that one time that keeps the suckers err I mean customers coming back.

Re:take it from me...

[Mike Hawk]

Wow, I'm sorry your experience has left you hating people and/or life. I enjoy going to Las Vegas and make several trips a year. I don't go expecting to win. I understand the odds of the many games and how to manipulate them to minimize the house edge. I also understand that there will always be a house edge. (I know, blackjack blah blah) I am not a sucker. Most times I leave ahead, other times I don't. The keyes are: Did I have fun? and How much did that fun cost me?

Thats what bringing in these game designers into the slot world is all about. Making the games more fun. This is a Good Thing. Sure you are going to lose, so try to have fun doing it.

Of course if your idea of fun is kicking people and acting all bitter on message boards this might not all be getting through to you anyway. Its all a matter of perspective I guess.

Re:take it from me...

[bigbigbison]

Well, I didn't work in Vegas and as i understand it generally their payout percentages are better than the casino i worked at. In Indiana (where I worked) the only industry that is more heavilly regulated than ours is the nucular industry.

You may have fun, but the vast majority of the people who go to the casino i worked at left angy and broke. I'm not talking about the person who goes four times a year. I am talking about the retired people who are throwing away their entire retirement fund. At our casino the most busy weekends were the first weekend of the month when people got their checks in the mail. I'm talking about the people who would come up with a pocket full of change to get just one more dollar bill. I'm talking about the people who try to use multiple different credit cards to get more money only to have them all rejected. Those people vastly outnumber people like you who go to have fun and know when to quit.

Certainly there are people who can go to casinos in moderation. Just like there are people who can do drugs in moderation or anything else.
However, most people that go to my csino do not appear to have your ability to have fun.

Casinos are not all marble and gold because they are losing. I'm sorry that I obviously hit a nerve, but I feel certain that the next time you go to a casino if you look around you will see that the majority of people at a casino are not winning and do not share the same attitude that you do.

They are too

[fm6]

... the ratio of win to lose ... is constant over a particular time period.

But that's true of any game of chance. If you play roulette for any length of time, the amount of money you're going to hand over to the house is extremely predictable. That doesn't mean that individual spins aren't random.

The world is full of phenomena that are unpredictable on an individual basis but highly predictable when you consider multiple events over time. This includes not only things like roulette wheels and slot machines (which are only "random" in a practical sense -- in principle you could predict individual spins with enough advance information) but quantum pheonoma, which underly everything that happens -- and which cannot be predicted even in principle. So the universe itself is fundamentally random, yet still manages to be full of predicatable events.

Re:They are too

[DrSkwid]

yes, you are right, probability is always spread like that.

What I know is I was working on a gambling project to produce an internet slot machine. The company was an existing electronic gaming company. I was given a photocopied document that explained the maths behind their fruit machines and how the payouts should be managed.

It detailed that random was not good enough especially as they wanted to be able to have predictability. To spin the wheels and know that three bells only lands once every X times based on 20 fruit on each reel and one bell (you work it out !). It might happen three times in a row or never. Early mechanical machines ran like this and would sometimes run out of coins to pay out (in fact I own one - circa 1958 it takes UK pre-decimal 1d pennies).

I wish I still had that paper but I had to pass it on.

Another good read on the subject is "The Newtonian Casino" by Thomas Bass.
The authors claim to have built wearable computers that analyze the peculiarities of individual roulette wheels and are able to narrow the odds and spead their bets to beat the house.

Re:They are too

[fm6]

So what you're saying is that electronic slots use some pre-determined pseudo-random sequence to prevent inconvenient runs of bad luck. That's interesting, but doesn't really change the practical unpredictability of the individual "pull". It doesn't even change the percentage that house keeps or pays out. It just avoids having the machine run out of coins, thus losing valuable sucker time.

By the way, the typical rand() function is also pseudo-random: it's a mathemtical sequence that satisifes some formal definition of randomness, but which is still completely deterministic. Why is it done this way? Because this level of randomness is adequate for most applications. (Though there have been famous examples where video game junkies have noticed repeatable behavior because of poorly-chosen pseudo-random functions.) Because it's usually not practical to embed a database of truely random numbers. And because it's often useful to be able to repeat a "random" sequence to see the effect of changing logic or assumptions of a simulation.

The Fat Man

[PeteyG]

George "The Fat Man" Sanger and Team Fat, legends in the computer game audio biz, have been making some really great music and audio for slot machines recently.

They've done the spectacular music for Wing Commander I/II, The 7th Guest, Loom, and loads more. And their slot machine audio has been getting really great reviews too!

Fortunately for us gamers, the Fat Man is still in the game business.

The Fat Man's website

an interesting (if depressing) view of casinos

[Clover_Kicker]

This series of articles is a very interesting look at casinos, how they work, and the psychology of gamblers.