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Past Story
Slot Machines Cha-Ching No More 8/7/2003 (Daniel Terdiman,Wired News) Thirty-two years ago, Robert Brownstein was driving cross-country when he decided to hit Las Vegas. Walking into Honest John's Casino, he began plugging nickels into the slots, and suddenly, a clattering flood of coins came rushing out. He'd hit the jackpot, and he was $82.55 richer. "In 1971, that was a lot of money," says Brownstein. "I was hooked on slots after that." While his winnings were part of his attraction to the one-armed bandits, equally alluring was the visceral experience so many players love: watching an endless stream of coins tumble out of the machine, hearing the sounds of them falling and scooping up the winnings. But these days, the visceral part of that experience might be harder to come by than even the jackpots. That's because one casino after another is abandoning coin-operated machines, adopting instead slots with new technology, known prosaically as Ticket-in/Ticket-out, which replaces nickels, dimes and quarters with paper tickets. Players start off by inserting paper currency into the machines. The slot then keeps track of the winnings. When players are ready to cash out -- assuming there's anything left -- they get a bar-coded card, which they can take directly to a cashier or to another of the casino's slots. Brownstein is not amused. "That's part of the process, the reason why you gamble, and the reward," he says of the addictive prospect of a jackpot of coins pouring from a slot machine. "That's what keeps you putting money back in." The casinos and the slot manufacturers beg to differ. More than 90 percent of MGM Mirage's 18,000 slot machines soon will be coinless, says Yvette Monet, public affairs manager for the company. MGM Mirage owns and operates 14 casinos, including marquee properties Bellagio and MGM Grand in Vegas. Similarly, IGT, a slot machine manufacturer whose machines dominate the industry, says it is embedding the EZ Pay Ticket System, its coinless technology, in nearly two-thirds of its new slots. All told, says IGT marketing manager Brian Casey, about 130,000 of the 700,000 slots in North America now are coinless. And that number is growing rapidly. In Nevada, the number of machines coming up for regulatory approval -- as all new gaming products must -- is causing a bottleneck. Consequently, the state's Gaming Control Board has had to double the number of engineers it employs to evaluate the devices, says board member Scott Scherer. But why are the machines so hot?  Full Story
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