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Passionate People Introducting GGB’s 2019
PeoPle TO Watch
25
climbing the Mountain
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K, first a confession. When I was first getting into journalism, I had an internship at Atlantic City magazine, a great little publication that covered the community in a way those “city” magazines did back then. I was a late bloomer well into my 30s when I worked for them. But every January they had a feature called 25 People to Watch, and it was the most popular feature of the year for the magazine. Of course with no internet or social media, we could only gauge that by questions about how you get named one of the 25, followed by complaints after publication that they were left off. Fast forward to 2002 when we launched GGB. Since Atlantic City magazine had folded by then, I don’t think I was stealing any intellectual property. So in our first January issue (above), we did our initial list of 25 People to Watch. Cover boy George Maloof, who along with his family owned the brand new Palms casino in Vegas, was joined by such luminaries as Congresswoman Shelley Berkeley, Penn National leader Peter Carlino, California tribal gaming legend Anthony Miranda, Australian gaming magnate Jamie Packer, Wynn Resorts VP Linda Chen and many others. It was a great list, but a list that has only grown more impressive as the years go on. (To see the full list, go to GGBmagazine.com.) In this, the 17th edition of 25 People to Watch, the list is no less impressive. From casino presidents to consultants to regulators to online gaming execs, the list is varied and diverse—so diverse, in fact, that we have a record number of women (nine) on the list this year. So sit back and read about people who may be influencing the way you do business in 2019 and into the future. —Roger Gros
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Global Gaming Business JANUARY 2019
Elaine Hodgson • President & CEO, Incredible Technologies
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elieve it or not, the trackball played an important role in the emergence of Elaine Hodgson’s company. Hodgson explains how the company utilized an emerging technology to push its Golden Tee golf game and its Capcom bowling game in an industry where joysticks were the norm. “We found that the trackball was much better at simulating the bowling game that we did originally, and then the golf game afterwards,” she explains. And that strategy continues today with the innovative slot-maker that has emerged in the Golden Tee producer, Incredible Technologies. “We’ve always been good, even today, to take emerging technologies that get to the price point of the industry that we are in, and use it to its best effect,” she says. Despite having a successful company producing amusement games, principally Golden Tee, which was to become one of the premier bar amusement games in the business, Hodgson said they decided to enter the gaming industry at a time the amusement games seemed to be faltering. “We were a little late to the party,” she points out. “Our competitors like Konami, Bally and WMS had decided earlier to get out of the amusement business and go into the home consumer markets, and/or slot machine markets. We decided to get into the slot business because it utilizes a lot of the same core competencies as the amusement games.” But Hodgson says IT underestimated what it would take, admitting to being a little naive. “Maybe we were a little arrogant, because we had actually done this before in the coin-op industry,” she explains. “We were nobody, and we did compete with the big players and found our niche and were successful, using innovation that truly nobody else was doing. So, we got in and thought we could do something similar in the slot machine industry. However, that industry is much bigger, and those competitors are much bigger, and being naive in the ways of regulations, it was a longer ramp-up than anticipated.”