Last year, Scientific Games, Bally’s parent company, shipped out more than 17,000 new units. The Wheel of Fortune-style bonus round featured a clip of Rachel saying, "Happy birthday, Grandma!" wearing a wedding dress.īally assembles all of its machines in a factory warehouse next to its game studios and tucked behind its Vegas corporate headquarters. I did, and a pared down version of the show’s theme song played, the NBC sextet smiled at me from the prime of their youth, and five reels of symbols - a Central Perk decal, a guitar, screenshots of characters - scrolled down the screen.
I took a seat in front of the unit, and Trask touched a logo on the display’s upper corner, selected a box on the display that ensured I would get a bonus round, and told me to hit the spin button. "That person, that girl who watched every episode of Friends when it came out, is our demographic," Trask said, standing alongside the cabinet. Friends celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, and the company hopes to tap some of that nostalgia. Trask, a tall man in his 30s with dirty-blond hair, showed me the company’s new Friends-themed game, installed on Bally’s ProWave cabinet, a slick, 42-inch curved console. Compared to the cacophony of a casino floor, Bally’s showroom was practically monastic, the lights low and the room silent apart from the soothing hum of two dozen hibernating consoles. When I visited Bally in mid-March, Mike Trask, the company’s senior marketing manager, walked me into the company’s showroom to play some games.
The room was silent apart from the soothing hum of two dozen hibernating consolesīally Technologies, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of slot machines, is headquartered 3 miles south of the Strip. And that’s all before you’ve even reached your hotel-casino, which - if it follows the modern standard - dedicates roughly 80 percent of its gaming floor to slots, and only 20 percent to table games. Once you pick up your rental car, you can stop for gas and play slots at a convenience store. You can play a slot machine in Las Vegas before you’ve even reached baggage claim: there are tiny slots parlors in every terminal of McCarran International Airport.
0 kommentar(er)
