Casino game developers are always working hard to come up with the next big innovation that will make their game machines more attractive to casinos and customers. The bright minds at Aristocrat have gone a different direction, and Chief Innovation Officer Joe Kaminkow was at G2E 2019 to show it off. He spoke about their new hardware, the Arc Canopy, with our Becky Liggero Fontana.
Extending the curved screens of their existing hardware, Aristocrat has built the Arc Canopy, allowing the player to completely immerse themselves in a game world. “It’s an idea we’ve been toying with for a while,” Kaminkow said. “They’ve built the prototype quickly, you know, sort of a garage shop type thing. It was fantastic, and we said we have to bring it to the show. And we have to bring it to the casino floor.”
Coming out of their thinkBIGGER campaign, part of the beauty of the Arc Canopy’s design is that it’s very eye catching, but places no additional burden on the casino. “It doesn’t take up more floor space,” he stressed. “It creates wonderment and it gives us interactivity between all the games, and it’s something special. So you know, we’re trying to make something special that you can’t play on your cell phone.”
Not only does it provide an impressive visual display that other machines can’t match, but it provides added features for the player. “The great thing about it, it can be anywhere from 4 to 16 units creating a tunnel or an archway to go through,” he said. “And very, very communal, whether it be a giant buffalo that everybody plays Thundering Buffalo together or a lightning storm breaks out over your head and starts adding wilds and other features to your play mechanics. There are a lot of things that are planned that I can’t talk about. But as they say, stay tuned.”
Liggero Fontana asked what we might expect in the future from Aristocrat. “What’s next is always what’s next,” he teased, and quickly returned to promoting this new Arc. “I guess we’ll have something next year that’s special as well. But this will start to ramp up and become more created for production and for multiple games and multiple casino floors, and I guess they’ll come out of here and see what the interest is and how many orders they have and figure out how many games we’re gonna launch it with. You can walk this floor, there are 30,000 people and probably 1,000 games, and there’s only one of these. That’s the key, that’s what makes it so special.”
