SUNSHINE GAMES
focus on the player experience, up to the point of being able to release it to the world, that’s the best you can do. There are certain factors that can help us be
successful, like themed themes – what’s popular right now? But there are a lot of games that you can sit in
front of and just know that somebody really loved making that game. That’s what Sunshine Games does.
CI: It’s not as simple as just developing the game though, is it? It’s so competitive on the floor once you’re out there, selling the cabinet is not even half the battle. MH: Artists and developers in our field have an unique challenge; we have to sell an idea to somebody that is walking past, three to 25 feet away. That is such a difficult thing to do. I remember talking to somebody that worked on Halo, which is one of my favourite games. I said, you put that on a 27” screen with stagnant glass and your best image of Master Chief and you tell me if you could sell that in a casino for someone to play. People walking by at the normal bipedal rate of about 3.5 miles an hour in a casino are not looking at slot machines per se, they are looking at the casino and just looking around. We have to get them interested in our game and they know nothing about it. We have to hit them with the title, the graphics, we have to entice them just to sit down… But I can’t say ‘Hey, come over here! Come play my games!’ It’s not like it was back in the 80s, when you had a casino person standing
inside a bank of machines saying ‘hey, come try your luck, this machine’s hot!’ The closest key to success in making a game – and
it’s intangible – is that people love things that other people love to make. I think that somehow is transcendent through the games. If they are really loved when they are being made, if we had fun making them, it comes across. You have to have fun to make fun.
CI: So what kind of progress have you been making – not just with the games, but are you using the Gauselmann platform? Are you working on licensed product or original IP? MH: The platform we have, developed in Germany, does so many things right; with any platform you might want to do other things but it’s not immediately possible, so you have to come up with an unique way to do things and we have been able to do that. There was a learning curve, and the time difference means sometimes we have very late or very, very early meetings, but we have been making games and developing intellectual property. We have already filed a large number of patents, and the company has added a very experienced gaming attorney, who understands slot machine games, to the team. We have made huge advances with our IP strategy, which is more important than ever. At last year’s G2E we got to preview our first two
games, including Taco Tuesday which is a big thing in the US. We trademarked the term for gaming too, as it’s a very common phrase and we are developing a lot of product around it. Plus, we had Amulet of
MAY 2018 33
Top left, clockwise: Sunshine Games team with Charles Hiten; Taco Tuesday; Anchalee Sum – Office Manager of Global Gaming Group; booth visitors
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