Larry DeMar is on a roll in Vegas. His secret: 55-year-old women want the same things as 17-year-old boys.
It's Thursday night at Boulder Station Hotel & Casino, on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Slots and video poker machines dominate the western end of this mega-size gambling den, filling the air with synthesized bleats. At the edge of the floor, beyond a colony of electronic slots with names like Texas Tea, Raining Diamonds, and Reel 'Em In, a bank of machines flashes the burnished logo of the hottest new game in casinoland: Multi Strike Poker.
A heavyset woman dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt rapidly punches the buttons of a Multi Strike machine as she plays what seems like endless hands of jacks-or-better. Her head barely moving, she focuses on the pixelized playing cards on the screen: Four rows of five facedown cards quickly reveal themselves one by one. She shows no emotion as soothing chimes herald a series of winning hands, pushing her to the top of Multi Strike's payout scale. She remains just as blasé when, moments later, lousy deals suck away her money. But once she blows the last of her credits, she reaches into the pocket of her hoodie, fishes out a folded twenty, and re-ups for more.
Multi Strike operates on what is, for video poker, an innovative concept: Gamblers pay for up to four hands' worth of bets at the start for the chance at incrementally larger sums as each hand is won. Say you pony up $20 for four hands at $5 per hand. Lose the first, and you're out the whole $20. Win with, say, a flush - which pays 5 to 1 - and your take is $25. Better yet, the payout for winning the second hand is automatically doubled. Win the third and your yield is quadrupled; nail the fourth and you bag eight times the normal payout. Should you land a royal flush in that fourth hand, you could rake in $32,000 on your initial outlay of $20 (though the odds of that are around 320,000 to 1).
Introduced late last year, Multi Strike is snagging rave reviews. In January, it won honors as the most innovative gaming product of 2002 at the American Gaming Summit - the biggest trade show for casino industry investors and analysts - and earned praise in the gambler's bible, Casino Player magazine. "I think this will be the top new video poker game in 2003," says Bob Dancer, who wrote the review. "Multi Strike creates volatility in a new way, and gamblers love volatility."
Multi Strike Poker is the brainchild of Larry DeMar, whose Chicago-based company, Leading Edge Design, creates patented gaming machines for casinos. DeMar says the game's revenues are at least double those of the average video poker machine. By now, there are about 1,000 Multi Strike machines in casinos nationwide. (In the gambling world, 500 is considered a success.)
Once an acclaimed designer of pinball machines (Addams Family, High Speed, Twilight Zone) and arcade videogames (Robotron, Defender, Stargate), DeMar launched Leading Edge in 1999 and quickly cut a first-look deal with Reno-based International Game Technology, a $2 billion publicly traded firm with about a 70 percent share of the casino-machine business. Companies like IGT value the arcade guys for their ability to devise clever concepts that stand out in a crowded market. Arcade veterans like DeMar, in turn, view casino gaming as a new and challenging arena with enormous profit potential. A top-selling game can reap more than $1 million per month in royalties for its creator. No wonder a half-dozen elite developers and artists have moved to casino machines over the past few years.
"Larry is at the forefront of that migration," says Joe Kaminkow, vice president of game design for IGT and himself a former pinball designer. The best arcade people, he explains, add an element of fun to machines that traditionally have been routine gambling devices. "By making a game entertaining, you can enhance the wins and soften the losses for your players. You learn to give your players good cookies - things that are fun and exciting. Good designers understand how to dole out those cookies in just the right amount."
Still, the transition from arcade to casino isn't always seamless. "One big difference is the audience," says DeMar, sitting over a bowl of wonton soup in a Vegas coffee shop (he's in town to check out how his machines are doing). "Pinball is aimed at 17-year-old boys, and with casino games, 55-year-old women are the center of the bull's-eye." Because arcade customers are generally computer-literate and play for glory rather than money, they usually have the patience and desire to figure out the intricacies of a new game. Casino gamblers, meanwhile, tend to be Luddites. For them simplicity is critical - as is the prospect of a windfall.
And that's the tricky part for DeMar and other migrants to the casino world. "Arcade designers have a tendency to add richness through complexity, but in a casino that is a disaster," he explains. "If the game doesn't immediately make sense to customers, they will cash out and walk away." Even more difficult, designers must devise a payout scheme that is attractive to players yet still makes money for the house. "If you don't feel that you can win your money back, you won't play," DeMar says.
Before he launched Leading Edge, Demar worked as director of engineering and design at Williams, the big pinball manufacturer. By the late '90s, he realized the new action was in casino games. "I thought we could come up with something different, and that we'd have a good shot at making money," he says, sitting behind the desk of his ground-floor office, which is decorated with machine art from various games he's worked on.
It took three years for DeMar's debut offerings - Cash King Checkers and Othello (both based on board games) - to reach casinos. Each had to be programmed from scratch and approved by the Nevada Gaming Control Board. With each new game, DeMar and designers Duncan Brown and Scott Slomiany - both Williams alums - create concepts and mock them up in Macromedia Director. After gameplay has been mapped out, the less enjoyable but critical task is to fine-tune the mathematics. Behind the aura of excitement and riches of every casino game lies a single guiding principle: Through a combination of perfect and imperfect play, payouts to players must total between 90 and 96 percent of the money risked. Any less and it will be shunned by gamblers; any more and the casinos won't turn a profit.
The Multi Strike payout gimmick came to Slomiany one night after work, while he was trying to dope out a mathematical problem that had been plaguing another Leading Edge project - Bunco Night, a video bastardization of a dice game popular with his mother and her friends. The next morning, DeMar suggested that they apply Slomiany's payout concept to video poker.
Brown then spent three months running computer simulations to calculate odds and a pay schedule for every conceivable hand. Ultimately, DeMar says, the team discovered "if we built Multi Strike on the standard poker-machine pay table, players would get skinned alive." Even those who played the game skillfully might not win enough hands to justify the extra outlay at the start. They considered modifying the pay tables, but that would've been confusing and a turnoff to gamblers, who'd be suspicious of prize money that was out of whack with the other poker machines in the casino. "We resolved it with what we call a Free Ride Card," DeMar explains. "It comes randomly and gets you to the next level whether you win the previous hand or not. While those randomly dealt cards simply serve to balance the game's mathematics, players love them. They have the idea they're getting something for free."
Leading Edge has six new games at various stages of completion, three of which - Bunco Night, a slot machine, and a poker sequel - feature the Multi Strike concept. Bunco and Big Split Poker just hit casinos - and with a bit of luck, DeMar will soon hit the jackpot.
