Las Vegas Review-Journal – Catch a glimpse of it in a crowded casino and Bally Technologies’ “Michael Jackson Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ” slot machine is striking.
It’s tall and housed in a sleek black case, with stereo speakers placed in the connected high-backed player’s chair and classic video of the late pop star playing on high-resolution screens.
Impressive.
Now take a look at that same slot machine in the uncrowded lobby of Bally Technologies’ Las Vegas headquarters. There, amid comparatively uncluttered surroundings where the lights and the sounds of the casino are absent and the giant machine can breathe, something weird happens.
Here, the game resembles a particularly colorful, animated sculpture in an art gallery, where the disciplines of animation, illustration, design and music somehow combine into a greater, impressive artistic whole.
Seriously. A monolith-from-“2001: A Space Odyssey” impressive artistic whole.
Las Vegans spend much of their lives playing, walking past or unconsciously listening to the whirrs and whines of slot machines. But despite — or, maybe, because of — this familiarity, we easily can forget that slot machines are the creative works of artists who work in an unusual, peculiarly Las Vegasian medium.
Is it stretching the definition of “art” to think of slot machines as works of art?
“Not at all,” answers Mark Hall-Patton, Clark County museums administrator.
“When you look at it, you have to realize that not only is the machine designed by somebody,” Hall-Patton says, but that “you had to have somebody do all of the art — the belly plate and the top plate and all of that.”
Even early, more utilitarian-minded slot machines often were created with an eye toward aesthetics. Hall-Patton notes that some had “a lot of handwork on them, detailed little gold flourishes here and there.”
It wasn’t necessarily “high art, but it was industrial art,” he adds, “and everything was supposed to look the same but, of course, they hand-detailed it so it’s not going to be.”
Mechanical and technological advances that came in subsequent years also sometimes helped to add to a slot machine’s artistic appeal.
“If you look at how the technology has evolved, it certainly has gotten more interesting, more high-tech, if you will,” says Joe Sigrist, vice president of product management for International Game Technology. “But, by the same token, some of the older machines were pretty complicated in their own right.
“I’ve seen some very early poker machines that literally had mechanical cards that fell. You see some that were extensions of more of a pinball machine, really.”
