Did you always want to be a casino executive - or did you have other plans growing up?
Marcus Prater, Executive Director, AGEM
“My dad was the local TV sports anchorman. We only had one TV station in such a small town, and so I was introduced to sports journalism by my father at an early age. I have an older
brother by two years and he was bitten by the same bug. He got a job with the sports department of the local newspaper when he was in high school and I followed suit.”
Marcus Prater
Next month, Marcus Prater leaves his role as Executive Director of AGEM after 14 years. G3 speaks to Marcus about his career, his achievements and passions, and what comes next for one of the industry’s most respected and recognisable figures?
Marcus, where do you hail from? How do you describe your roots?
I was born in Twin Falls, a town on the southern edge of the state of Idaho, 50 miles from the Nevada border. Te Snake River runs through the town from the Snake Canyon, which the daredevil, Evel Knievel, tried to jump in 1974.
I was 10 years old and he was a hero of mine, even before he tried to rocket over the 1,600ft gap in my home town. Knievel originally wanted to jump the Grand Canyon, but he didn’t get permission.
When I lived there, Twin Falls had a population of around 25,000 people, and my dad was the local TV sports anchorman. We only had one TV station in such a small town, and so I was introduced to sports journalism by my father at an early age. I have an older brother by two years and he was bitten by the same bug.
He got a job with the sports department of the local newspaper when he was in high school and I followed suit. I started working for the city newspaper when I was 16 years old.
I always wanted to be a sports writer. I recently found a box of my old belongings from eighth grade in which I declared that I wanted to go to the University of Oregon. Stanford and Oregon were the best journalism schools on the West side of the country and by good fortune, my mom was transferred in her job to Oregon, right before I graduated from high school. So I got in- state tuition to attend the University and worked first for the college newspaper and then for the Register Guard newspaper in Eugene, Oregon.
What was your first job - how old were you and what did it entail?
When I graduated from college I had two job offers. Te first was from a financial newsletter in the Bay Area of San Francisco, while the second was as a sports writer in Casper, Wyoming (pop. 50,000). So I took the Casper job, as the financial newsletter sounded dull, and I thought Casper would be a short stopover on my way to Sports Illustrated magazine - the dream job.
Ultimately, I stayed in Casper for six years, the last five as sports editor. It was a positive experience because the Casper Star-Tribune was a statewide newspaper, not just for the local Casper audience and the University of Wyoming sports team was also doing extremely well at the time, in both football and basketball.
What led you into the gaming space?
After six years in Casper I became restless. So when a high school friend from Twin Falls told me his dad was running a casino in Jackpot, right on the Idaho border and the northern edge of Nevada, I was immediately interested. He told me that great things were happening at the company, Ameristar Casinos, which operated Cactus Pete’s in Jackpot. So I moved back to Twin Falls and started in the gaming industry in December of 1993.
I began one month after Ameristar went public. Tey had broken ground on a casino in Vicksburg Mississippi ahead of the riverboat boom in the early Nineties. I worked for Ameristar from 1993-96, filling out my casino marketing background on the operations side the business.
During this time Ameristar was expanding, opening in Vicksburg and Council Bluffs Iowa, before making the big move to acquire a Henderson, Nevada-based casino that was under construction (which would eventually become the Fiesta Henderson property owned by Station Casinos). Ameristar also moved its corporate office to Vegas in 1996, as trying to hire casino executives in Twin Falls was proving a challenge. I made the move to Henderson at the same time, recently celebrating 25 years in the city on the Labour Day holiday.
A year later, the HR manager I’d worked with at Cactus Pete’s switched roles to join Sigma Game Inc., the Japanese slot machine company that was the first to create a slant-top cabinet. So
WIRE / PULSE / INSIGHT / REPORTS P27
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