“ When we realized the company was going under , we just took the equipment home and finished the game ourselves ,” recalls Ditton .
From there , the company would go on to develop a series of games for the home console , pinball and arcade markets at that time . A hit arcade game put them on the map — Capcom Bowling would lead to more business for the couple , who incorporated as Incredible Technologies in July 1985 . Today , Hodgson remains president and CEO of the company , and Ditton is executive vice president .
But in those early days , they were operating out of their home while caring for a newborn baby , and focusing on growing the business .
“ We were doing home games for quite a while , until we were approached by Data East to do pinball games ,” Hodgson says . “ That ’ s what got us into the arcade world .” ( Data East was founded by Gary Stern , and would eventually become Stern Pinball .)
In moving to the arcade world , Hodgson and Ditton were able to apply past experience working for toy manufacturer Marvin Glass and Associates ( creator of famous games like Rock ’ Em Sock ’ Em Robots and Simon ) and for arcade game manufacturer Midway , the Chicago-based company eventually bought by Bally Manufacturing and subsequently sold to WMS Gaming .
By the late 1980s , IT had established itself as the proper heir to the Chicago amusement-game tradition started by Bally , Williams and Midway . Several of the company ’ s arcade games became legends that survive to this day , such as Silver Strike Bowling , PowerPutt Golf , and the product that defines the amusement side of IT ’ s business to this day , Golden Tee Golf . Those amusement products continued to evolve throughout the 1990s — notably , Golden Tee 3D , launched in 1995 , was the first multiplayer , interconnected gaming system with tournament capabilities .
By the early 2000s , Incredible Technologies had grown into the largest U . S . manufacturer of coin-operated amusement games , but Hodgson and Ditton were looking for new challenges . Ditton ’ s thoughts turned to the casino slot machine , and his engineer ’ s mind began exploring what goes into creating a slot game .
How to Make a Slot Machine
In 2006 , with the Golden Tee bonanza still strong after 17 years , Hodgson and Ditton began in earnest in their quest to produce a casino slot machine . “ We wanted to try something new and different and impossible to do , so
why not take on multibillion-dollar companies ?” laughs Ditton . One would assume that IT would bring in slot-sector veterans , mathematicians and engineers to guide them in applying their amusement expertise to the casino world . One would be wrong .
“ We just sort of hacked it out ,” Ditton says . “ That ’ s pretty much how we did everything — we would just say , ‘ Let ’ s do it ,’ and we did it .”
Instead of experts , Ditton brought in ... YouTube videos . “ Through YouTube videos , I was able to map out popular games , and attempt to re-create the reel sets and analyze how the math was done ,” he says . “ Luckily back then , the reels were very short , with a couple of hundred characters in a reel . It was all about the math .”
Much trial and error ensued , but by 2010 , the company released the Magic Touch series of poker , keno and slot games . Two years later , the company arrived at its first Global Gaming Expo — with its first successful slot , the game Crazy Money . The benefit IT ’ s slots had was a user-friendly interface , thanks to the company ’ s finely tuned sense of how to appeal to players in an amusement capacity . But the math needed more work .
Ditton kept working at it . He analyzed more games , studied the features , and evaluated the math of popular games . “ I had a program that could analyze the math of slot games ,” he says . “ It would run 50,000 games at a time , look at the results , and try to determine what players would like . It would sort of give its opinion on whether the math was good or not .
“ And it worked out pretty well , because as soon as that program was done , we started having success in 2017 with a wide variety of games .”
“ When we started using the math tool , that was a step taken to really understand the mystery behind game math back in the day , in our own way ,” comments Dan Schrementi , the 21-year Incredible Technologies veteran who began on the amusement side , but is now the company ’ s president of gaming .
“ But meanwhile , on the other side , we were studying the market , which was less complex with fewer competitors back then . The features , the color schemes , the theme types , what ’ s working , what ’ s not working — that ’ s a part of the business that I focused on back in the day .
“ But in the past 10 years , that ’ s changed greatly . Product management is a weapon that every company doing great in gaming has excelled at . We ’ ve invested in product management , which is really just the role that sits between sales and game development — while still empowering game development to be creative and take risks .”
Playing the Crowd
By the beginning of this decade , IT had established itself as a significant player in the U . S . slot market , and a company fully equipped to compete with the best in the industry . Its success can be traced to a laser focus on games and game features that have proven themselves successful in the market .
This was , in fact , a requirement set early on by Hodgson . “ Elaine ’ s mantra was , we ’ re not going to take any game to G2E that didn ’ t have testing to show it was already a proven success ,” Ditton says .
“ I really want to know if a game ’ s going to do well before I put it out in a casino ,” Hodgson says . “ We have always tried to test games before we put them out , and we ’ ve always tried to follow on with similar themes or math that have worked .”
Ditton says it ’ s a philosophy that can be traced to the company ’ s coin-op origins . “ That ’ s the way it ’ s been for coin-op forever ,” he says . “ Guys got a game together , threw it in the pickup truck , took it to a bar , and sat there and
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