Aruze Gaming

Aruze Gaming was founded in 1969 in Tokyo by Kazuo Okada, who had begun in coin-operated arcade games and pachinko and by the end of the 1970s had turned his firm — then Universal Lease — into one of Japan’s principal pachinko-machine manufacturers. His subsequent invention of the near-miss feature in electronic slot machines drove the company’s international expansion; the Aruze USA subsidiary was formed in 2000, and the Las Vegas manufacturing and design operation received its Nevada gaming-manufacturer licence in 2004. The American arm now operates as Aruze Gaming Global under the Empire Technologica group, designing and manufacturing slot cabinets, electronic table games, and iGaming products for casinos worldwide.

The firm designs and manufactures gaming machines across three principal product lines: slot cabinets (the Muso, Lightscape, HyperSpeed, and Speed families of stepper and video reel machines), electronic table games (multi-player blackjack, baccarat, and roulette platforms built to run in a casino pit), and digital iGaming content licensed to online-casino operators. Design and cabinet manufacturing are concentrated at the Las Vegas facility on Palms Airport Drive; the firm holds Nevada gaming-manufacturer licences and equivalent licences in the other principal North American, Latin American, Australasian, and Asian gaming jurisdictions.

Aruze’s operating identity has always sat in an unusual place in the gaming-manufacturing sector: Japanese in origin at a time when American and Australian firms dominated the licensed slot business, and organised for decades around pachinko rather than around the American reel-spinner tradition. That combined heritage — pachinko sensibility, Japanese electronics manufacture, Nevada regulatory compliance — has been the identifying signature of Aruze cabinets on the casino floor since the “Magnificent Sevens” machine became one of the most-played reel spinners in Nevada in the late 1980s. The Las Vegas operation received its unlimited Nevada manufacturer’s licence in 2006 and has operated under that licence continuously since.