Bally Technologies

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Bally Technologies Incorporated
Type Public (NYSE: BYI)
Founded 1968
Headquarters Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
Industry Casino games
Accounting Systems
Products Video slot machines, Reel Slot machines, Casino Management systems
Revenue ▼ $547 million USD +13.2% FY '05 to '06)
Subsidiaries ACSC, MCC, SDS
Website www.ballytech.com
This article is about the Bally company, a manufacturer of slot machines and pinball machines. For other uses, see Bally (disambiguation).
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Bally Technologies, Inc. NYSE: BYI[1][2]is an American corporation based in Las Vegas, Nevada and is the descendant and continuation of the original Bally Manufacturing Corporation of Chicago.

Bally Technologies was founded in 1968 as "Advanced Patent Technologies". It eventually changed its name to "Alliance Gaming Corporation" and acquired, in 1996, "Bally Gaming International" (a former division of the Bally Manufacturing Corporation), which it decided to run as a subsidiary under the name "Bally Gaming and Systems". In 2006, the entire Alliance Gaming Corporation organization was officially renamed Bally Technologies Inc.

The Bally brand name has been in existence for 75 years with a complex history of re-organizations, mergers, and divestitures. It has its roots as an early and successful maker of pinball games, and later with slot machines. It also has been associated with both the health club and hotel/resort industries.

Contents

[edit] History

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The Bally Manufacturing Corporation was founded by Raymond Moloney on January 10, 1932 when Bally's original parent company, Lion Manufacturing, established the company to make pinball games. The company took its name from its first highly-successful game, dubbed Ball. The company, based in Chicago, quickly became a leading maker of the popular games. In the late 1930s, Moloney decided to begin making gambling equipment, and had great success developing and improving the modern mechanical slot machines that formed the backbone of the nascent gaming industry. After a wartime foray into manufacturing munitions and airplane parts, Bally Manufacturing Corporation continued to produce innovations in both pinball and slot machines through the late 1950s, and also designed and manufactured vending machines and established a coffee vending service.

Ray Moloney died in 1958 and the company floundered briefly. Amid the financial failure of parent company Lions Manufacturing, Bally was bought out by a group of investors in 1963. Through the 1960s Bally continued to dominate the slot machine industry, cornering over 90% of the worldwide market for the machines by the end of the decade. In 1964, Bally introduced the first electromechanical slot machine, called the "Money Honey."[3] In the late 1960s, Bally became a publicly-traded company and went on an acquisition spree, buying several companies including German company Wulff-Apparatebau (renamed Bally Wulff) and Midway Manufacturing, an amusement game company from Illinois.

In the late 1970s, Bally entered the casino business as New Jersey legalized gambling in Atlantic City. This effort moved forward even though the company was temporarily unable to attain a permanent license for the completed casino. During this period, company head William O'Donnell was forced to resign due to alleged links to organized crime. With O'Donnell out of the picture, the company successfully opened Bally's Park Place on December 29, 1979.[4][5] Also in the late 1970s, Bally made an entry into the growing market for home computer games. The Bally Astrocade, as the machine was called, had some very advanced features for the time. These included a palette of 256 colors and the ability to play 4-voice music. The machine also shipped with a cartridge that allowed users to do a limited amount of programming on the machine themselves (using the BASIC language), and record their creations on cassette tape. Unfortunately, the machine's price point was higher than that of the Atari 2600 (its major competition), and it had a much more limited set of available games. Despite a loyal following, it failed to compete successfully. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Midway would become a primary source of income for Bally as it became an early arcade video game maker and obtained the licenses for two of the most popular video games of all time: Space Invaders and PacMan.[4]

By the mid-1980s, the company again was flush with cash and began buying other businesses including the Six Flags amusement park chain and the Health and Tennis Corporation of America. The health club division became extremely successful with the fitness trend of the 1980’s and 1990’s. The company also was finally successful in purchasing several casinos, including the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in the Las Vegas Strip (which was subsequently re-branded as Bally's Las Vegas) and the Golden Nugget Atlantic City. This expansion quickly took its toll on the company finances however, and Bally was soon forced to sell off several divisions, including Six Flags and Bally-Midway. The pinball division, along with Midway, was acquired by Williams Electronics in 1988.

Under new management in 1992, the newly named Bally Entertainment Corporation focused on the health club business and spun off the game manufacturing-related parts of the company as a separate division for resale. The Aladdin's Castle chain of game arcades was sold to Namco in 1993, and was renamed Namco Cybertainment, Inc. By 1993 the core manufacturing division was the leader in fitness equipment including the Life Fitness i.e. Life Cycle, Life Step, Life Rower machines. However, this was short lived for Life Fitness was sold to the Brunswick Corporation. 1995 saw the merger of Bally Gaming International Inc. and the Alliance Gaming Corporation, thus becoming a subsidiary of Alliance, having been completely divested from the parent company previously (licensing back the Bally name). The company now named, Alliance Gaming International, had three divisions, Bally Gaming (slot manufacturing), Bally Systems (slot accounting and management) and Bally Wulff (wall machines). In 1998, Bally Gaming introduced Thrillions, a wide-area linked progressive jackpot system, with cartoon icon Betty Boop as the initial game theme on the link. The Thrillions wide area progressives are unique in that they permit players to play for the same jackpot while playing different machines of different denominations, such as nickel, quarter and dollar slots.[6] This introduced a new type of recurring revenue source for the company, opening the possibility of no longer having to rely strictly on the sales of manufactured items. One of the notable video gaming platforms to come from Bally in this period was the GameMaker, the first touch-screen video poker game. There was also the EVO VIDEO game platform and the EVO 3, which was created in part through a unique Rapid Development Partnership (RDP) with Microsoft Corporation.[7][4]

With the advent of a new century, Alliance Gaming now named Bally Technologies, is focused on the casino gaming industry. Notable acquisitions of such companies as Casino Marketplace, MindPlay and Advanced Casino Systems Corporation (ACSC) have allowed the Bally Systems division to dominate the rapidly expanding slot accounting market. The Company’s most recent systems acquisitions include the former Honeyframe, Ltd. of Telford, England and Micro Clever Consulting (MCC) of Nice, France.[4] Both companies offer scalable suites of slot accounting and casino management systems. Bally, in a surprisingly short period of time, navigated a turnaround that took the publicly traded company from the brink of Nasdaq delisting in 2000 to record revenues and profits just two years later. A historic milestone occurred on December 12, 2002 when Alliance Gaming Corp. made the jump from NASDAQ to the New York Stock Exchange, trading under the ticker symbol “AGI,”. In 2004, Bally acquired Reno, Nevada-based Sierra Design Group (SDG), a notable developer of gaming devices and systems, primarily for the expanding Class II Native American and government-run central-determination video lottery businesses. Refocused as a gaming technology company, Bally re-engineered its entire line of video and reel-spinning slot machines, utilizing an entirely new software program. Dubbed the ALPHA OS, this new operating system dramatically improved Bally's entire portfolio of slot products, leading to the release of "Hot Shot Progressives," a new series of video and reel-spinning slot machines. Eclipsing the Blazing 7s slot, Hot Shot Progressives quickly became the company's biggest seller and most successful product launch in the company's 75-year history. As part of this transformation, Bally also introduced several new gaming platforms, including the V20 upright, the dual-screen V20/20 video slot, the S9E reel-spinner and the CineVision wide-screen video gaming device. Currently, more than 690 casinos worldwide utilize Bally systems products running on more than 366,500 slot machines.

In 2007, Bally Technologies celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Bally trademark with a series of special customer events in Atlantic City, Las Vegas and Chicago. Additionally, Dr. Christian Marfels, author of the book "Bally - The World's Game Maker," was commissioned by Bally to write a second edition to his book, bringing the history of Bally to the present day. This book was published in both hardcover and softcover editions and was given to every Bally employee as a special gift commemorating the Company's milestone anniversary.

[edit] The Name

Many casinos and businesses worldwide would take on the Bally name and logo in the maze of ownership, division spin-offs and licensing agreements. Midway would continue to use the Bally name for its pinball games, until WMS Industries (the parent company of Williams) ceased pinball production in 1999. In 1995, Bally Entertainment Corporation (formerly Bally Manufacturing Corporation) was purchased by Hilton Hotels Corporation, later the casino resorts division of Hilton Hotels became Park Place Entertainment, which later changed its name to Caesars Entertainment, and in 2005 was acquired by Harrah's Entertainment. On March 31, 2005, WMS Industries struck a deal with Australian company The Pinball Factory to give them a license for the intellectual properties and the rights to re-manufacture former Bally/Williams games in the field of mechanical pinball. In addition, The Pinball Factory also has bought the right to manufacture new games using the company's new hardware system under the Bally brand. Bally Total Fitness and distributor Bally France still use the same 'Bally' logo though any formal business relationships, as of June 2007, are coincidental.

The shareholders of Alliance Gaming Corp., the parent company of Bally Gaming, Inc., voted on March 6, 2006 to formally change the name of the corporate entity to Bally Technologies, Inc., discontinue the use of Bally Gaming and Systems as an Alliance subsidiary and present a singular name. Bally Technologies is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BYI.[8][2]

[edit] Notable pinballs using the Bally brand

[edit] Developed by Bally or Bally-Midway

  • Amigo (1974)
  • Ballyhoo (flipperless) (1932)
  • Ballyhoo (flippers) (1947)
  • Baby Pac-Man (1982)
  • Blackwater 100 (1988)
  • BMX (1982)
  • Boomerang (1974)
  • Capersville (1967)
  • Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirt Cowboy (1976)
  • Dogies (1968)
  • Eight Ball (1977)
  • Evel Knievel (1977)
  • Fireball (1972)
  • Fireball II (1981)
  • Four Million B.C. (1971)
  • Frontier (1980)
  • KISS (1979)
  • Lady Luck (1986)
  • Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man (1982)
  • Playboy (1978)
  • Sky Divers (1964)
  • The Six Million Dollar Man (1978)
  • Wizard! (1975)
  • Xenon (1980) features music and voices by electronic music composer Suzanne Ciani
  • Nip-It (1972) features ball grabbing feature called balligtor. Used on TV show Happy Days

[edit] Developed by Midway

[edit] Developed by The Pinball Factory

[edit] Notable slot machines

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Listed Companies: Bally Technologies, Inc.. New York Stock Exchange. Retrieved on 25 June 2007.
  2. ^ a b Bally Technologies Inc. - Company Information. Retrieved on 25 June 2007.
  3. ^ "Slot Machine History", Online Casino Press. Retrieved on 21 June 2007.
  4. ^ a b c d Christian Marfels; 2007, Bally: The World's Game Maker, 2nd ed., Bally Technologies Inc., Las Vegas ISBN 978-1-4243-3207-6
  5. ^ "Bally Manufacturing Corp.", Encyclopedia of Chicago. Retrieved on 21 June 2007.
  6. ^ Alliance Gaming, SEC 10-K, FY 1999, p. 5.
  7. ^ Alliance Gaming, SEC 10-K, FY 2001, p. 3.
  8. ^ Listed Companies: Bally Technologies, Inc.. New York Stock Exchange. Retrieved on 25 June 2007.
  9. ^ "Internet Pinball Database - The Addams Family", Pinball Hall of Fame. Retrieved on 22 June 2007.