“I’d better buy a cake and some ribbon,” laughs Ian Hughes as he looks ahead to next week’s Australasian Gaming Expo in Sydney and, in a few months’ time, G2E in Las Vegas.
The long-time Chief Commercial Officer of Gaming Laboratories International (GLI) and CEO of GLI Australia is reflecting on his near-30 years with the company, which also happens to coincide with the 30th anniversary of GLI Australia and 35th anniversary of GLI globally. That’s right, Hughes – as the third ever employee of GLI Australia back in 1994 – has been there almost the entire time and as such has enjoyed a front-row seat not only to the gaming industry’s expansion through Australia and across Asia-Pacific but to all corners of the globe.
And with the company planning to celebrate its milestones in Sydney and Las Vegas in the coming months, he admits to some recent reminiscing of his time in the hot seat – initially as an engineer before his vast experience saw him rise through the ranks (he also happens to be CEO of GLI Japan).
“Adelaide (in South Australia) was GLI’s second office,” he recounts. “The first office was in Toms River, New Jersey, so, before it really started expanding in the US, setting up offices in Colorado or anywhere in the world, it was little old Adelaide in South Australia.
“Gaming all around the world was just getting started – a lot of jurisdictions were opening up – and the Adelaide casino (now SkyCity Adelaide) had just been authorized to operate poker machines.
“GLI Australia was actually owned by the local university, so GLI didn’t own it at that time and licensed its name, and we wrote the technical standards for the South Australian government. There were just three of us engineers working out of a building at the university campus and gaming had started to expand in the APAC region, New Zealand opened up, then Africa and so a lot of that development in Africa and New Zealand was coming out of Australia, while the US office was looking at Europe and expansion in the US. The world was split into two.”
That small Australian office would ultimately prove to play a central role in the development of the global slot machine industry. Up until the mid-1990s, the US market had been dominated by mechanical reel or stepper slots, but in Australia a new form of video slot machine was growing in popularity, thanks largely to the efforts of Aristocrat – the local “poker machine” supplier founded by Len Ainsworth in 1953.
“I remember testing the Aristocrat machines in Australia for the US markets and back then there was no tokenization, which was a new term that was invented in Australia,” Hughes recounts.
“They also had different terms for the US market like handle, whereas Australia called it turnover. I remember looking at the machines and thinking ‘What the hell is handle? Oh that’s coin-in’. We actually had to have a chart converting US terms to Australian terms because everybody would call things something different.
“So I tested a lot of games for Aristocrat going into the Colorado market, and that was really the introduction of tokenization and video and a lot of those features coming out of the Australian market. They are obviously commonplace today but it was a completely different animal: the Australian-style games were very different to US games.
“I remember going to Black Hawk Casino in Colorado and the casino actually posted ‘Australia-style games’ as an advertisement to entice players in to play an Australian style slot machine.”
As Hughes recalls, the gaming industry wasn’t exactly a juggernaut in the tech space in those days, with suppliers often following the lead of Big Tech when it came to coding and the development of operating systems.
But times have changed.
“The gaming industry and the consumer electronics industry has sort of combined,” Hughes says.
“The gaming industry used to really be far behind – maybe five years behind – consumer electronics and couldn’t keep up, but I think it has now caught up and has even led the industry in a lot of ways as well. I have definitely seen it go from being a laggard to on pace and leading in many areas, such as systems with concepts like understanding the customer, player databases, loyalty systems. These are commonplace now, but they were things that came out of the gaming industry well before airlines and hotels started to pick them up.
“I don’t think the gaming industry gets enough credit for how it went from being behind to leading the industry.”
Technology and its vast integration into all aspects of society have also transformed the industry landscape, opening the door for new players who may never have had the resources or know-how to make their vision a reality in decades past.
Hughes recounts how in his early days at GLI, gaming machine suppliers would develop everything from their own operating systems and random number generators to all of the coding required to set a game live.
As suppliers began ramping up the quality of their sound and graphics, GLI would stumble upon all sorts of issues during testing – from communications dropping out to bill acceptors breaking down because, as Hughes explains, “the processing power just wasn’t there.”
“Now we’ve seen the continuous evolution of that, and the ability to take an off-the-shelf operating system like a Microsoft operating system or Unix operating system meant the gaming machine manufacturers could leverage those developments. As a result the industry’s exploded,” he says.
“The barriers to entry to develop a game product have come right down, because you don’t need to build all those technologies up. To get started in the gaming industry now you can basically buy an operating system, buy a logic board and just develop your own content, your graphics, your sound and your game engine. You don’t need to worry about all those other things and so we’ve seen many more suppliers enter the market, which has been great.”
Similarly, technological advancements have transformed the regulatory space with regulators globally shifting their focus from ensuring gaming machines and products are stable to issues such as anti-money laundering controls and responsible gaming.
As such, GLI’s own remit is evolving, underpinned by the sheer power of today’s operating systems and the many tasks they are able to perform, as well as the increasingly important role being played by data and all that goes with keeping it safe. Today, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence are the industry’s buzz words, both now central to the day-to-day testing GLI undertakes globally through subsidiaries like Bulletproof, the cybersecurity arm it acquired back in 2016.
Hughes, though, insists the company will never lose sight of its foundations.
“We must not forget our core: whatever we do, we’re known for being a high-quality testing laboratory,” he says. “We still understand that manufacturers need to get products to market in a timely, cost-effective manner, so at our core we continue to work on that every day.
“It’s true we’re going off and doing new, exciting and sexy things around AI but at the end of the day we want to make sure that we never forget those fundamentals.”
Since its inception 35 years ago, GLI has grown to become a company of 1,800 staff based in 35 jurisdictions globally. GLI Australia – the company Hughes joined as just its third employee in 1994 – has around 100 staff of its own based all around the country.
But, true to his word, Hughes notes that the company’s home base has always remained in Adelaide – a city he describes as playing a “phenomenal” role in GLI’s success.
“We have an office in Sydney and in Melbourne and we have to be in those locations,” he explains. “They focus on those specific markets and specific requirements, but the bulk of the testing is out of Adelaide.
“We’ve got two tech centers in Adelaide. It’s one of the most liveable places in Australia, so our engineers enjoy it there. I think it’s a great place for us to be and a little bit of our well-kept secret.”
Visit GLI Australia on Stand 580 at the Australasian Gaming Expo from 13 to 15 August at ICC Sydney, and wish them a happy 30th birthday!
