Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming December 2016 16 Industry profile “It was really, for us, about themes that resonated with players on a deeper level. We didn’t want to go the way of panda bears and bamboo, we wanted to have something that was meaningful.” video-based slot machines. Straight away I said, “Yes, I definitely want to do this.” IAG: Why the instant attraction? TP: I’ve always had an affinity for slot machines. My mom was a very simple woman. She grew up in Arkansas during the depression, she never had a passport, never cared about going to the theatre, never went to a museum, didn’t read books. But the one thing she liked to do twice a year was take the bus to Las Vegas. You could take a six-hour bus ride, they would drop you off in Downtown Las Vegas for 12 hours and then you’d ride back for six hours, so it was a 24- hour round trip. She used to take about US$100 and would even change her nickels at the bank and carry it on the bus with her! The whole experience for her was that, from the moment she changed that money and climbed on the bus, she started thinking about whether she would win or not win and what was in store. I loved that about my mom because it was about simple pleasures. She didn’t actually care whether she won or lost, she just wanted it to last so she even developed her own hypothesis about what she should do – bet one nickel, then three nickels, pull the handle three times. So when I started working for this company, Silicon Gaming, I said, “Wow, this is everything that I thought about entertainment.” For me, entertainment doesn’t have to be an art movie and have so much gravity, be so self-important. I worked for that company until they were acquired by IGT and then spent time working for other small start-up companies in the US. IAG: How did your own company, Aspect Gaming, get started? TP: My partner at Aspect called me out of the blue about nine years ago and said, “Hey listen, I’d love to get together some time.” I said, “Absolutely, yeah we should do that sometime,” but I’m a guy from LA so when we say, “We should get together” we don’t actually mean it! But he said he would be down on Friday and when we caught up he told me he was running an engineering group in Shanghai. At the time, my wife and I were in the process of adopting our daughter from China so I’d been on this wait list. I had also started studying Chinese because I knew that I would go to China to pick her up at some stage and figured I may as well learn Chinese in the meantime. I mean, the anticipation is a bit like a four or five year pregnancy – you never know when you’re going to get the call. He said, “Look, I really have an idea to serve players that are currently under- served.” A lot of western companies were putting games in Macau and it felt like there was an opportunity for a company like ours to be based in China and to really serve the mass market. So we were basically three guys and a power point but we got together, raised some money and kicked off the company.