STATESIDE


Stateside


Sharon Harris highlights some of the key events of her last 30 years with the magazine.


30 years in the making I


f you are lucky to live to an older age, the time comes to assess your life. Were your expectations realized? Did you overcome your failures? School reunions are a good barometer because you and your classmates grew up in the same environment.


When I fi rst became a gaming journalist in 1993, I was a


relatively young woman. My 10 years of amusement industry experience had fulfi lled my goals and I wanted new challenges. After slow growth in the 1980s, Gaming seemed the perfect


transition as early 1990s’ gaming exploded beyond New Jersey’s East Coast long-held monopoly. I enjoyed being on the ground fl oor of the excitement. Atlantic City’s new casinos set operational standards after May


1978. Paraphrasing Frank Sinatra’s “New York New York,” anyone who made it in Atlantic City, could make it anywhere. That


helped many executives and managers succeed in emerging jurisdictions and properties. As Casino International Managing Editor Matt Broughton


mentioned in September, this October issue marks my 30th anniversary of joining the former World’s Fair and its EUROSLOT magazine. Current publisher Datateam acquired WF and renamed it Casino International in June 2001. Thanks, Matt, for your compliments on my tenure. My fi rst


feature, published February 1994, analyzed gaming in all 50 states. What a dramatically different story from today’s gaming landscape. I happily returned to feature writing last month with an


overview of U.S. sports betting’s amazing evolution since 2018. Legalization would have been impossible in 1994, only two years after the federal government prohibited it.


8 OCTOBER 2023


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