Len Ainsworth W
LEGENDS OF GAMING
A gaming monarch of creativity and invention. Ricki Chavez Munoz speaks to a true industry legend…
ith a name that enables one to posit similarities that range from ordinary to majestic, Leonard Hastings Ainsworth, Executive Chairman Ainsworth Game
Technology, has seen plenty of action that has taken him from the factory floor to the most elevated pantheon in the industry, The Gaming Hall of Fame. Ricki Chavez-Munoz and the Gaming world celebrate this gaming Monarch of creativity and invention’s 90th birthday. Certainly Len’s achievements are worthy of such an accolade, with a history that dates back to 1953, when he takes over his father’s company in Sydney, Australia. To proceed, the original company was Ainsworth Dental Company Pty Ltd and this was the name that the machines bore for the first few of years say, 1953, 1954 and 1955. It then became Ainsworth Consolidated Industries with separated dental production from the manufacture of slots. Some years later this company becomes Aristocrat, which he left in the hands of his family. Len Ainsworth remembers: “I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1994 and at that time was the sole owner of Aristocrat although I had six of my children working
Len with Danny Gladstone, MD of Ainsworth
for me – I have 7 sons. As I was told that my prostate cancer, if it became aggressive, could kill me within the year I decided the best solution was to give my children, my wife and my ex-wife equal shares and await my fate. “Fortunately I had a second biopsy six months after
the first and it returned an all-clear reading but by then I had given things away. It became obvious that Aristocrat, the public company, was happy to run its own affairs, my children left one by one and Ainsworth Game Technology Ltd has gone on from there.”
Some time ago, I read a celebrated interview with
Roy Masters published by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2005, where some marked comparisons allude to a semblance of adventure of the saga of that most noble of legendary monarchs, King Lear. Notwithstanding the fact that a momentous period in his life acted as catalyst for Len when, like Lear, he also divided his worldly possessions between his children, there the fatalistic similarities end. Mercifully, unlike the King, Len kept his marbles and did not wander madly in the company of his Fool. Although he might say something to the tune of the fact that one is best when one keeps one’s own company! Going through my Literature research papers to
see how we might see history repeating itself, it is nearly impossible to find lives that are being lived as fully as that of Len Ainsworth who, on July 11th, enters the rarely trodden decade that is the preamble to the time-honoured century. So we stop for a moment and look through Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and find dynastic echoes filled with clans and persons
24 JULY/AUGUST 2013
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