Jerry Seelig is a player.
Chances are he's been to your casino and played your floor. Perhaps he's even pulled you aside and asked how AC Coin & Slot's games rate with your customers or what he and his team can do to make you even more satisfied. It's because of passionate, dedicated executives like Seelig that AC Coin & Slot has become one of most well-known slot manufacturers of its size in the United States today, which is no small feat considering the company's humble roots.
It all started in a little garage not far from Atlantic City in 1978. Within this garage Seelig's father, Mac, got AC Coin's big industry break: a contract to distribute International Game Technology's (IGT) slot machines in Atlantic City and the Caribbean. To this day, AC Coin is still IGT's exclusive distributor in both regions. "IGT has been our partner for all time," Seelig, AC Coin's general manager and executive vice president, said. "It was through IGT's help that we became able to create our own slot machines."
It wasn't an overnight decision for AC Coin to start creating games of its own. "After about 20 years in the business we decided that maybe we had a few good ideas of our own," Seelig said. "We started out with a product called Bonus Road Rally, which was an outstanding failure." But, as the old saying goes, often times it's failure that breeds success.
An Empire Begins
After learning from its mistakes with Bonus Road Rally, AC Coin developed its original bonus hit. "Our first successful product was a game called EmpireTM," Seelig said. "It was a very basic game. We kept it simple, kept it right in front of players and made it easy for them to understand what was going on." Empire was available on the company's first system, the X SeriesTM, and featured a miniature Empire State Building replica as its top-box; during the bonus round, a King Kong-inspired ape climbed the walls to fetch the player's bonus.
"It was well received," AC Coin's vice president of sales and marketing, Chris Strano, said. "There are still a couple of those machines out on the floor today. And we plan to launch an 'Empire Environment' at this year's G2E, which has several apes climbing the Empire State Building."
Super Slot(to) Design
The design process at AC Coin begins with a great concept and finding the technology necessary to deliver it. But there is a factor in the design process that tops the list: "At the root of all game design is the player," Seelig said, "and how that player feels throughout every element of the game. The player is the most important part."
It was with this game-design model that AC Coin created its most successful line of bonus games to date: the SlottoR series. Some of the Slotto titles available today include Seaside FriesTM, Big Game Show BonusTM and Popcorn SlottoTM, just to name a few. The series features a PlexiglasR sphere top-box that houses swirling balls; one ball eventually drops to reveal the player's bonus amount. But now AC Coin offers an even bigger and better version of this super successful concept with the introduction of Super Slotto CelebrationR.
With Super Slotto Celebration, AC Coin has created a colossal community-style Slotto game with eight seats of fun surrounding a super-sized Plexiglas dome in the center. "It's undoubtedly the biggest thing to happen in slots," Seelig said.
The dome is filled with 300 large Slotto balls with a bonus event that is nothing short of amazing. "We have five Super Slotto Celebrations currently installed, and we have orders for a bunch more," Strano added. "I think we'll install close to 50 by the year's end. That's our goal."
But you won't see Super Slotto Celebration everywhere -- the game's "super" size makes it a difficult fit inside smaller casinos. "We have to be extra careful in our roll-out strategy with Super Slotto because of its size and its manufacturing challenges. Plus, you can only get the Oompa Loompas to work so hard back there," Seelig joked.
Mega Branding
Along with AC Coin's new Super Slotto games comes a new branding initiative that aims to embody the company's success at producing proprietary bonus games. "Mega Bonus SlotsTM is how we're going to brand and market all of our products going forward because that is what our games are; they're mega bonus-producing machines," Strano said.
In order to stay ahead of the competition and keep up with the increasing demand of its Mega Bonus Slots, AC Coin has stepped up its manufacturing process and is supplementing its Atlantic City-based manufacturing plant with a new 80,000-square-foot facility in Reno. "We have a very vast process here by which we create products and get them to market," Seelig said. "That's really one of our value adds for the casino and for us. We can design and get a product to market in a year. There are not a lot of companies that can do that. This year alone, it took us eight months from conception to get Super Slotto out to market." And with the opening of an additional manufacturing facility in Reno, AC Coin should be able to deliver its products even quicker.
Superior Service
AC Coin stands behind Mega Bonus Slots. The company only wants its games earning casinos the highest possible payback and providing the highest possible entertainment for players. To do that, AC Coin has to have a superior handle on its game management. "We're training all of our account managers to be slot managers," Strano said. "We're running a virtual casino now. We have over 3,000 games out there in the field, and we're organizing them like we're managing our own casino."
To properly manage its Mega Bonus Slots, AC Coin has strictly followed a customer-centric business model. "Over the last three years, our strategy has focused on serving our customers even better, getting closer to the actual casino operators and scaling down our territories for our account managers to make sure we have our games configured in the right area," Strano said.
That customer-focused model has paid off -- AC Coin is in more casinos today than it has been in the past. "By the end of the quarter, our Mega Bonus Slots will probably be in 275 casinos throughout North America," Strano added. "By the end of the year, they will be in over 300 of the best casinos in North America."
A lot is involved to bring some of the highest earning products to market -- from sales to service to delivery to field modifications that keep the games at peak performance. Seelig added: "We spend a great deal of money and time on our service facilities, and we have a very large service staff all over the country. We clearly see the future as indefinable for us. The colors with which we are going to paint this industry are going to be amazing ... We're going to continue developing more and more sophisticated games that will deliver the content in a very simple way so that players understand it and are constantly surprised at what our games offer."
Besides the time, energy and effort AC Coin has spent to double its growth each year for the past three years, at the heart of its development and its new Mega Bonus Slots branding, is the passion that's evident in each of its 250 employees. "The passion of the company is what has been unique about our growth over the last few years," Seelig said. "W'eve been able to -- knock on wood -- find really great people that are super passionate about what we do."
That passion is what makes Seelig a player, bringing him to casino after casino to play the floor. And he, along with the other zealous employees at AC Coin, always plays to win.
Krista Reiner is the Senior Associate Editor of Casino Enterprise Management. She can be reached at (701) 293-7775 or by email at editor1[at]aceme.org.
Comments
Post new comment