Musings: Are Casinos the Modern Arcades? (Part 2)

I've been thinking more about my trips to the casinos on my recent vacation.  Vince and I went to two up north in Michigan, Turtle Creek and Odawa.  Anyone who's been to a casino can call to mind the sound of being inside one immediately.  The ringing and incessant sound of the slot machines going is unmistakable.  I hadn't thought much about the connection between slot machines and video games until I saw this video of George Sanger working on music for a slot machine.  This made me wonder more about the connection between (what I think of as) video games and slot machines.

While I was in the two casinos I took some notes on the companies who made the different games.  (You should have seen some of the looks I got from security as I walked around taking notes on my phone about the games!)  Granted, I wasn't in Vegas, so there are probably many more possibilities, but for where I was here are the ones I found:

Konami (think Castlevania, Contra, etc)
Aruze (Shadow Hearts)
WMS Gaming
Bally (both WMS and Bally have connections with Midway: Ms. Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, etc)
IGT
Aristocrat (these last two are the largest slot producers that make slot games for Playstation, mobile, etc)

Obviously, there are connections between video game companies and casino gaming companies.  This makes sense though, as many of the technologies are the same.  In fact, slot machines are, in a sense, arcade games.  They hold the software/hardware inside and are able to show video, play audio, and have gameplay by the simple press of a few buttons from the player.

One of the most interesting things as you walk around a casino is to hear the pitch of the machines.  Have you ever thought about it?  Casinos have a key: C major.  I wonder if this is worldwide or just in the US...  Most of the machines arpeggiate around the C major chord and go up the octave when you score or win.  This way the sounds are organized in a harmonious way.  It's been years since I was a kid in a busy arcade, but visiting one as an adult, they are a completely different experience.  Each machine is making its own set of sounds in its own key and makes for a very noisy, conflicting sound environment.  In contrast, the casinos are set up (aurally at least) so that the sound of a win feels more collective among the players and is easy to hear sound above the sound of the other machines around.  Clearly, the casinos have made a deal with these producers to keep a common tonality among the machines.

There are classical and popular music references thrown in some games.  Jackpot manor plays a bit of Bach's Fugue in D minor (fugue starts at 2:50).  Another game by Aruze that I wasn't able to catch the name of played Tchaikovsky's Trepak (Russian Dance) from The Nutcracker.  These were both subtle in comparison with the Queen game I played by Konami.  This game has music notes, instruments, and pictures of the members of Queen that are the onscreen symbols you want to match.  In the bonus rounds, you literally pick the Queen song you want to hear during bonus rounds.  I chose We Are the Champions.  Here you can watch some footage of someone playing the game in another casino during a bonus round.

I'll be interesting to see what happens with slot gaming music in the future.  The old style of machines that simply arpeggiate a C major chord probably won't go away-- they'll become more classic, though.  The casinos I was in definitely had a disproportionate number of older people playing them, so the bias could've been for more of the old style of machines/music.  However, my memories of Vegas (though a few years old) are much the same.  Music is getting more complex and newer machines can be heard that play music more like George is showing in his video above-- snippets of music as you play that make up a longer song.  In fact, when I hear music like that-- where a couple of notes of the phrase play each time I spin the reels, I'm even more inclined to play the next game more quickly so I can hear the musical phrase complete itself.  I know I'm a video game music nerd and not everyone is having that reaction, but at some level, folks probably are inclined to play the next game to hear more of the musical phrase.  Otherwise, it's like hearing only a few words of a spoken sentence and needing to continue to play to hear the whole sentence spoken and thus meaning imparted.

The arcade may have come and gone, or they might resurge in some way if the gaming experience can become special in some way that it can't at home.  Either way, my experience this weekend and work on this blog left me wondering: are casinos the new arcades?  The environment seems very much the same to me, but even more musically harmonious.  The next time you step into one, give a listen to all those machines singing in harmony...  Seems like that win might not be so far away....