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

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!

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.