LAS VEGAS (AP) – Consider them the concept cars of casinos.
Whether it’s shooting down enemy planes, strumming a guitar-shaped controller to hit the right notes or swiping a table-top screen to grab the best set of cards first, the latest slot machines are looking a lot like an arcade. And that’s what some in the industry are betting will attract younger players to the casino floor to revive gambling revenues that have sagged in recent years.
Until their September debut at the Global Gaming Expo, or G2E, in Las Vegas, it wasn’t entirely clear what “skill-based slots” might look when Nevada lawmakers and gambling regulators opened the door to games requiring little or a lot of skill rather than simply random number generated chance.
For the legacy, big brands, including IGT and Scientific Games, the changes meant adding bonus rounds to their traditional slot machines, such as actually playing “Space Invaders” in between watching spinning reels. For a new “The Simpsons” slot machine, it meant the chance to physically scratch a lottery ticket during a virtual trip to the Kwik-E-Mart or catch handfuls of virtual doughnut sprinkles via a motion sensor capturing your own hands doing the scratching and catching.
It was the younger, smaller upstart companies that went further, offering up arcade-style games and more action per-square-foot, including NanoTech’s take on “Pac-Man” and pinball, G2 Game Design’s version of “Guitar Hero” or GameCo’s 30- to 60-second racing and shooting games.