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 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 design and manufacturing operation took its unlimited Nevada gaming-manufacturer license in 2006. The founder’s own affairs then ended it: Aruze Gaming America filed for Chapter 11 in February 2023 and was liquidated that summer.

The firm designed and manufactured gaming machines across three product lines: slot cabinets, in the Muso, Lightscape, HyperSpeed, and Speed families of stepper and video reel machines; electronic table games, meaning the 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 were concentrated at the Las Vegas facility on Palms Airport Drive, and the firm held Nevada gaming-manufacturer licenses and their equivalents across the principal North American, Latin American, Australasian, and Asian jurisdictions.

Aruze’s operating identity sat in an unusual place in its sector: Japanese in origin at a time when American and Australian firms dominated the licensed slot business, and organized for decades around pachinko rather than around the American reel-spinner tradition. That heritage had been the signature of an Aruze cabinet since “Magnificent Sevens” became one of the most-played reel spinners in Nevada in the late 1980s. What ended the firm had nothing to do with the floor. A $27.4 million judgment against it for the costs of defending Okada in the Wynn Resorts litigation, on top of some $20.8 million of bank debt, put Aruze Gaming America into Chapter 11 in February 2023 — a case the Nevada bankruptcy court designated a mega case, and one the company did not emerge from.

The name outlived the company that carried it. The assets were auctioned in June 2023 and the Las Vegas plant closed that August, releasing one hundred people. Interblock took the electronic-table-games line; the slot portfolio, the overseas business, and the Aruze name itself went for about $7 million to a Las Vegas firm incorporated in 2012 as Empire Technological Group, Ltd. — no relation to Okada’s business — which trades today as Aruze Gaming Global from the same Palms Airport Drive address. The cabinets on the floor still carry the name. The company that built them does not exist.