GameCo CEO Blaine Graboyes promised that his company’s first skill-based slots would be rolled out in Atlantic City … and he was as good as his word. While the eyes of the industry were on Las Vegas for Global Gaming Expo, it was announced that the 
Boardwalk would be the recipient of GameCo’s first skill-based product. (In fairness, it should be noted that Graboyes is “not in love with the term skill-based slots” but we can’t think of anything better.) Caesars Atlantic City, Harrah’s Resort and Bally’s will jointly debut Danger Arena. Its minimum wager is 50 cents but you can bet up to $20 on your ability to “shoot” digitally animated robots. The game contains 10,000 “maps,” randomized in their degree of difficulty, to provide the required element of chance. Graboyes told The Bergen Record that it’s a more “cartoonish” game than other first-person-shooter ones like Call of Duty. As for his choice of Atlantic City as his primary market, Graboyes cited his nostalgic fondness for the Boardwalk, an attachment dating back to his youth.
The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement hasn’t signed off on Danger Arena yet but, if it does, expect a stampede for the game: Applications are pending in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and maybe even New York, if Empire City Casino at Yonkers Raceway follows up on expressions of interest. While skill-based slots are regarded as the magic bullet for recruiting Millennial slot players, Graboyes pointed out that many Baby Boomers were weaned on video games, so the potential audience is wider than some think. GameCo plans to introduce one new game every month as a means of building its audience. (There’s something to be said for that approach, as opposed to blitzing the industry with a plethora of new slot machines simultaneously.) Garden State regulators are practically popping buttons with pride over their first-to-market status. “The division has been actively encouraging the industry to submit innovative products, and we are glad to have the opportunity to review GameCo’s skill-based game through our New Jersey First program,” said DGE Director David Rebuck.
Rival Gamblit, which is tight with the Downtown Grand, among others, is firing back with its own shoot-’em-up game, The Brookhaven Experiment. Not content to simply unleash a new game upon the world, Gamblit has gussied it up with a glass cube, with virtual-reality capability, fog machines, and “a giant subwoofer in the floor [that] thumps and bumps.” Sort of like the guy who drives past your house booming hip-hop at tooth-rattling volume in his car. The arcade version of The Brookhaven Experiment has been upgraded with more player options and, depending on your monster-shooting skills, a game can be protracted to as many as five minutes. Said Justin Corcoran, CEO of Phosphor Games Studio, “the player can move around in the cube space and have waves of monsters coming at them. In addition to the monsters coming at you, which can be eight to 12 feet in size, we have secondary targets in the background that we’ve designed exclusively for this version.” One possible stumbling block to acceptance it that it’s a high-limit game: The minimum bet is $15. Since you can’t win more than triple your bet, casinos are probably going to be better off selling this as an experience than a reinvention of the slot machine bonus game.
* Meanwhile, back at G2E, JCM Global debuted a slot machine that does everything short of press your pants. It will place a sports bet for you (not so good for sports book foot traffic, maybe) and perform currency exchanges. Fuzion, as it’s called, could sell lottery tickets in states that — unlike Nevada — have lotteries. It even prints out the tax forms you’ll have to file if you hit a $1,200 or higher jackpot. “Nothing is a bigger pain for these [casinos] when somebody hits that 1099 threshold that locks up a machine until an attendant and a key person come around, take the information, process it, go in the back room, get all your tax information, and then finally pays you off. That process alone can take 20 minutes — and in those 20 minutes, the machine isn’t playing and the player isn’t playing,” JCM Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Tom Nieman told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He estimates the ‘IRS lockdown’ time could be cut from 20 minutes to seven. And since casinos would rather have players spinning the slot reels than filling out paperwork, Fuzion should be music to their ears.
* This doesn’t come as a great surprise but Internet gambling and daily fantasy sports fell 
short in the Pennsylvania Legislature — and the Keystone State was supposed to be the easiest state in which to get them approved. A hearing that was scheduled to discuss how other states handled ‘Net betting and DFS got scrubbed in the waning days of the Lege. A DFS-only bill has been reported out of the senate House Appropriations Committee and might see the light of day yet. However, the odds don’t look good for online betting or even (less-remunerative) DFS, meaning that Gov. Tom Wolf (D) will have to look under his sofa cushions for the $100 million in badly needed revenue that these forms of Internet wagering were supposed to bring into the state.
