“Our company made the decision several years ago to focus our energy and investments on being a leader in supplying technology to the gaming industry. The recent name change to Bally Technologies, Inc. is a reflection of the progress we have made toward that goal and an extension of our long-term strategic plan,” said Richard Haddrill, CEO of Bally Technologies. “The signature Bally script logo is known worldwide and our forthcoming 75th anniversary in 2007 is a reminder to us and our stakeholders of the long-standing value of the Bally name in the gaming industry. Given our enhanced commitment to research and development, the Bally Technologies, Inc. name also more accurately reflects our corporate identity as a true technology provider.”

From technological milestones such as the first slot machine featuring a “bottomless hopper” and the first fully electronic reel-spinning slot to the world’s first electronic slot management system – SDS® – Bally Technologies continues this path of innovation with a number of groundbreaking new reel-spinning, video-slot and systems products.

Take CineVision™, for example. This remarkable new video-slot platform breaks the mold of traditional video gaming, creating an entirely new gaming experience for slot players. What makes CineVision unique is a revolutionary video monitor that uses the same 16:9 aspect ratio found in movie theaters and on the latest wide-screen plasma televisions. Enhancing CineVision’s immersive gaming experience for players is a dynamic new surround-sound audio system. An ergonomically designed cabinet with padded armrests also create a zone of privacy and comfort for the player, filtering out annoying distractions for the ultimate video gaming experience.

Then there is Hot Shot Progressive™, an entirely new concept in video slots that features five of Bally’s most popular reel-spinning titles embedded in the reels of this dramatic new game. What makes Hot Shot Progressive such a unique breakthrough is in the way the game presents secondary bonus options to the player. Each reel on Hot Shot Progressive from left to right features a miniature version of a classic Bally slot: Blazing 7s®, Diamond Line 777s®, Triple 777s Double Jackpot®, Triple 777s Triple Jackpot® and Triple Blazing 7s Seven Times Pay®. When a player enters the bonus round, they actually “play” these mini-versions of the full-sized originals for a theoretical chance to win up to five progressive jackpots on the same game.

“Playing this game makes one realize what an achievement it was to develop it,” noted respected gaming columnist Frank Legato in the March, 2006 issue of Strictly Slots magazine. “The game would not have been possible a couple of years ago. For one thing, Bally’s new ALPHA video platform with its intricate, brightly colored graphic capabilities was essential. Each of the miniature representations of classic slot machines … provides a striking presentation to the player.”

In yet another technological tour de force, Bally recently received industry accolades for its new S9000 multi-coin, multi-line reel-spinning platform. A prestigious panel of judges at the 3rd Annual Gaming & Technology Awards selected the S9000 as “Best Slot Product” for 2005. The S9000 seamlessly combines the best features of a video slot with a mechanical reel-spinning slot into one integrated and fully operator-configurable platform. With five back-lit illuminated mechanical reels and a top-mounted video display, the S9000 operates on Bally’s vaunted ALPHA OS™ platform, is capable of linking to select M9000 ALPHA video titles and supports thousands of existing Bally S6000 reel-spinning titles.

Another recent technological marvel from Bally is the new iVIEW™ display, a dynamic customer-relationship marketing device capable of cross-promoting everything from gaming promotions to dining outlets and entertainment venues. The full-color interactive LCD touch-screen display is mounted in the slot machine to allow players to review their player’s club points, request a casino host, view entertainment and dining options, or anything else that a casino operator might want to provide. When customers insert their slot-club card, they receive an exciting personalized greeting in full color on the iVIEW display. The system can even present customized greetings and other unique messages designed for specific players.

In addition, iVIEW also allows casino slot personnel to instantly access vital slot machine data, such as machine diagnostics, ticket transaction logs and repair/maintenance information in a much easier-to-understand format. Demonstrating the breakthrough in customer relationship marketing that iVIEW affords casino operators, the upscale Borgata Hotel, Casino and Spa in Atlantic City, N.J., recently ordered 4,000 iVIEW™ displays, along with the company’s Power Winners™ progressive bonusing product.

The Bally Technologies of today has truly come a long way from its humble beginnings as a small startup company born in the midst of America’s most challenging economic era: The Great Depression. But company founder Ray Moloney had a vision of a game that would make his fortune and, ultimately, lay the foundation for the modern gaming industry.

The year was 1931. People were looking for an affordable escape from the bleak landscape of unemployment, endless breadlines and hard times. At seven balls for a penny or 10 balls for a nickel, pinball games offered an inexpensive few minutes of fun and amusement. It was the beginning of the heyday of pinball machines.

Young entrepreneur Raymond T. (Ray) Moloney just happened to be at the right place and in the right time to take advantage of this booming craze. He founded Bally Manufacturing Company on Jan. 10, 1932 as the manufacturing arm of parent company Lions Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago to develop a small, but highly profitable, pinball game called the “Ballyhoo.”

By the mid-1930s, the success of the Ballyhoo and other pinball games like the “Goofy,” the “Airway” and the innovative “Rocket” and “Bumper” pinball machines propelled Moloney’s Bally Manufacturing Company to the forefront of the rapidly growing amusement game industry. In April 1935, Moloney would move his expanding Bally Manufacturing organization to a modern plant at 2640 Belmont Avenue in Chicago. For the next 48 years, that singular address on Belmont Avenue would be home to Bally Manufacturing Company and its worldwide operations.

While the ubiquitous pinball game would form the backbone of Bally Manufacturing’s success those early years, it was

Moloney’s decision to enter the slot machine business that would forever change the fortunes of his company. Although Moloney did not invent the modern three-reel slot machine (that distinction goes to Bavarian-born Charlie Fey of San Francisco), he nonetheless became one of the most successful manufacturers and distributors of the immensely popular gaming device.

Ironically, however, it was the overnight success of Bally’s “Reliance” automatic dice machine, created in 1936, that catapulted the company into the gaming business. That same year, Bally introduced the first of what was to be a long line of highly successful and innovative slot machines. Called the “Bally Baby,” this little tyke of a slot machine measured just five inches by seven and a half inches and weighed only 8 pounds. It predated its earliest competitor, the Mills Vest Pocket Bell, by 2 years. The overwhelming success of the Bally Baby convinced Moloney to extend his company’s manufacturing line into slot machines, a course that he pursued with great vigor and imagination.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, however, changed everything. In the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice that swept the country during World War II, Moloney ceased building gaming and amusement devices at his Belmont Avenue plant. He converted his operations to manufacturing a variety of wartime materials, from bombsights and oxygen regulators to detonator fuses and gunnery trainers. His plant operated 24 hours a day, without ceasing, earning a multitude of military citations for contributing to the war effort and hastening victory.

The return to peacetime in 1945 thrust Bally Manufacturing headlong back into building gaming and amusement devices. Innovations continued to pour out of the Belmont Avenue plant, including the “Hi Boy,” an upright console-style slot machine featuring a new electromechanical mechanism that would become the primary success behind Bally slot machines for the next 30 years. Bally also helped to popularize the use of "flippers" on pinball machines. First introduced by Gottlieb on its "Humpty Dumpty" pinball game in 1947, Bally quickly adopted this new skill-play feature on its pinball devices. Subsequent Bally improvements to the original Gottlieb flipper mechanism further enhanced the company`s growing dominance of the pinball industry.

Bally Manufacturing, under the imaginative and aggressive leadership of Moloney, was once again atop the amusement industry world. However, the roller coaster ride of success after success was about to abruptly change with the death of Ray T. Moloney on Feb. 26, 1958.

In the years following Moloney’s death, the company began a slow descent into uncertainty and fiscal insolvency. Moloney’s two sons, Ray, Jr. and Donald, valiantly fought to save their father’s company by looking for ways to fund new research and development. The company even sold its highly profitable coffee vending division to the Seeburg Company in 1961 to pay for mounting debts and estate taxes. The end came on June 17, 1963, when the assets of Lion Manufacturing Corporation, including its subsidiary Bally Manufacturing Company, were sold for $2.85 million after a failed attempt by Moloney’s sons to convince the company’s banking trustees to give them the money to build a new generation of electromechanical slot machines.

Was it the end of Bally Manufacturing, or just the beginning of a new era for this remarkably resilient company? Happily, a new chapter in the company’s history would be written by the heir apparent to the enterprising spirit of Moloney, one William T. (Bill) O’ Donnell. A close associate of Moloney, O’Donnell worked his way up to head Bally Manufacturing’s sales efforts. He orchestrated the purchase of Bally Manufacturing’s assets by himself and a group of investors. The result was a new Lion Manufacturing Corporation, with Bill O’Donnell as president. Bally was back, and a radically new slot machine product, called “Money Honey” would set the stage for the company’s future success.

November of 1963 marked the debut of “Money Honey.” Like Henry Ford’s Model T, this three-reel electromechanical slot machine broke new ground, forever changing the landscape of the gaming industry. The two innovations that the game brought to the casino industry were its reliable electronically controlled construction and the incorporation of a “bottomless” motor-driven payout hopper capable of automatic payouts of up to 500 coins without the use of an attendant. For the next 12 years, Money Honey in its many variations would become the flagship game of Bally Manufacturing’s slot machine division.

Like Moloney, Bill O’Donnell used a combination of personal charisma, business acumen and an iron will to forge a new Bally gaming and amusement empire. By 1968, a whopping 94 percent of all slot machines sold in Nevada, the preeminent gaming market in the world, were Bally machines.

That same year, 1968, saw Bally Manufacturing Corporation incorporated as a publicly traded company with Bill O’Donnell as president. The company’s financial strength in the 1960s and 1970s allowed O’Donnell to pursue an ambitious expansion program resulting in the acquisition of numerous companies, including Wulff-Apparatebau, Germany’s leading manufacturer of wall-mounted amusement devices, Midway Manufacturing, a manufacturer of coin-operated arcade amusement games and Nevada-based Bally Distributing, giving Bally a foothold as a licensee in the lucrative Nevada casino market.

August 12, 1975, marked another milestone for Bally as its ticker symbol “BLY” flashed across the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The event marked the first time a gaming company joined the illustrious ranks of the nation’s corporate elite on the NYSE’s trading floor. O’Donnell’s strategy of expansion through mergers and acquisitions was working beautifully. Bally Manufacturing was on the rise.

In 1976, Bally demonstrated its continuing innovation and leadership of the gaming industry by creating a new division, called Slot Data Systems (SDS). As the first fully computerized data-collection system for the casino industry, SDS ushered in a new era of electronic slot management, slot accounting and slot security previously unheard of in the casino industry.

By the end of 1976, Bally Manufacturing sat atop the gaming and amusement industries as the preeminent supplier of slot machines, coin-operated arcade games and slot accounting systems. However, stormy days loomed ahead for the industry giant. That same year, the year of America’s Bicentennial, the New Jersey state legislature voted to allow casino gaming in Atlantic City. In a bold move, Bill O’Donnell seized the opportunity to get into the virgin Atlantic City gaming market on the ground floor. In October 1978, construction began on Bally’s Park Place Hotel & Casino. The hotel opened with great fanfare on Dec. 29, 1979 under a temporary gaming license. Unable to obtain a permanent gaming license from the then-new New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, O’Donnell voluntarily stepped down from his post as president and CEO of Bally Manufacturing. He always hoped that, some day, he would return to the company that he loved and helped build into an international gaming powerhouse.

In the 1980s, with dedicated managers such as 50-year employee Bob Harpling still waving the Bally flag, Bally Manufacturing went through a series of important transformations.

The company left its main manufacturing plant on Belmont Avenue in1983 and moved to new facilities in Bensenville, with Bally moving its corporate headquarters to an office tower near Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and expanding its amusement game operations with distribution agreements with the Japanese manufacturers of “Pac Man” and “Space Invaders,” two of the most successful video games ever developed. Imitating Pac Man’s little gobbling video goblins, Bally went on a buying spree of its own. In the mid-1980s, the company diversified its portfolio by gobbling up major theme-park operator Six Flags Corporation, the “Great America” theme park, “Lifecycle” exercise bicycles and Scientific Games (a leading lottery ticket manufacturer). During this period Bally also purchased the MGM Grand hotels in Las Vegas and Reno, the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City and the Health & Tennis Corporation, a major health club operator. Almost overnight, Bally had refocused its corporate identity from that of a slot and amusement game manufacturer to that of a global leisure industry giant. The company then split its former core manufacturing operation into two separate divisions, amusement equipment and gaming equipment, and located them in Franklin Park and Bensenville, Ill., respectively.

O’Donnell died in 1995, having never realized his dream of returning to Bally. As in the passing of company founder Ray Moloney before him, history was about to repeat itself.

Despite divesting itself of its pinball division and Six Flags amusement park operations, Bally’s debt, magnified by its far-flung and cash draining gaming investments, was hurting the company. Nevertheless, Bally managed to still move forward, albeit sporadically, with new product innovations, such as its first video slot in 1982 and its first video poker machine in 1984. This was followed by the System 5000 slot series, based on the newest “stepper motor” electronics-driven technology. Another milestone was reached in 1989 when Bally Gaming, the slot manufacturing arm of the company, moved from its cramped Reno facility into a new 150,000-square foot plant on Bermuda Road in Las Vegas, just south of McCarran International Airport.

In October 1990, New Jersey financier Arthur Goldberg became president and CEO of Bally Manufacturing. Goldberg undertook a massive restructuring of the company, creating Bally Gaming International, Inc. (BGII) as a separate subsidiary of the newly renamed Bally Entertainment, Inc. In July 1992, the corporation spun off Bally Gaming International completely as its own independent company. Bally Entertainment, Inc. then licensed the “Bally” name to Bally Gaming International, which was comprised of three divisions: Las Vegas-based Bally Gaming (slot manufacturing), Reno-based Bally Systems (slot accounting and management) and Hannover, Germany-based Bally Wulff (wall machines). The original Bally Manufacturing Company thus completed its metamorphosis into Park Place Entertainment, having merged with Hilton Hotels Corporation’s gaming division in the mid-1990s to create the world’s largest gaming corporation.

Meanwhile, Bally Gaming International, Inc. had returned to its core business of manufacturing slot machines. Energetic and talented Hans Kloss, head of the successful and profitable Bally-Wulff division, became president and CEO of Bally Gaming in May 1993. In the spirit of Ray Moloney and Bill O’Donnell, Kloss took a personal, hands-on approach to managing the company. Thanks to innovation, imagination and sound business planning, Bally Gaming was once more on the rise. The company rebounded in 1994 with the “Game Maker®,” the world’s first touch-screen video slot machine. This breakthrough game allowed players to enjoy up to 10 different games, from video poker and keno to blackjack, just by touching the screen. Once again, Bally had leapfrogged ahead of the competition. In March 1996, Game Maker, which sold tens of thousands of units over the years, received the coveted “Excellence in Leadership Award” by the gaming industry for its revolutionary design.

The latest chapter in Bally’s 75-year history began on June 18, 1996 with the merger of Bally Gaming International, Inc. and Alliance Gaming Corporation.

With the advent of a new century, Bally has indeed come full circle. As founder Ray Moloney intended, the company is once again focused on producing the world’s best gaming devices. A new management team, headed up by former Manhattan Associates, Inc. president Richard M. Haddrill, is forging ahead with a variety of exciting and innovative games and slot systems for the global casino industry.

In 1998, Bally Gaming introduced Thrillions®, a wide-area linked progressive jackpot system, to the casino industry, with cartoon icon Betty Boop™ as the initial game theme on the link. The Thrillions network allows players to vie for the same linked jackpots, ranging from thousands of dollars to more than a million dollars. The Thrillions wide area progressives are unique in that they permit players to play for the same jackpot while playing different machines of different denominations, such as nickel, quarter and dollar slots. Currently there are nearly 2,900 games on separate Thrillions links in casinos throughout Nevada, Mississippi, New Jersey and various Native American gaming establishments across the country.

One of the many video gaming innovations to come from Bally recently was called “EVO™”. The EVO VIDEO game platform was created in part through a unique Rapid Development Partnership (RDP) with Microsoft Corporation. Both the EVO VIDEO and EVO HYBRID slots continued the tradition of innovation which began with the original Ballyhoo pinball machine.

Another innovative division driving Bally’s ongoing success through the years, Bally Systems continues to dominate the rapidly expanding slot accounting market. Recent acquisitions of such companies as Casino Marketplace, MindPlay and Advanced Casino Systems Corporation (ACSC) further broaden Bally Systems portfolio of slot management, accounting and software products. There are currently several hundred thousand gaming devices being monitored by SDS and ACSC in hundreds of casinos worldwide. Casino Marketplace provides a complete suite of software-driven slot promotions. ACSC offers casinos a comprehensive array of slot management tools. And MindPlay is the creator of a unique blackjack table game that uses state-of-the art optics for player-tracking and security purposes. The Company’s most recent systems acquisitions include the former Honeyframe, Ltd. of Telford, England and Micro Clever Consulting (MCC) of Nice, France. Both companies offer the global gaming market their own robust and scalable suites of powerful slot accounting and casino management systems, further complementing Bally Systems’ global product capabilities.

Bally, meanwhile, continues to build on a turnaround that took the publicly traded company from the brink of Nasdaq delisting in 2000 to record revenues and profits just two years later. A historic milestone occurred on December 12, 2002 when Alliance Gaming Corp. made the jump from NASDAQ to the “Big Board” of the venerable New York Stock Exchange. Trading under the ticker symbol “AGI,” the Company’s executives celebrated the occasion by ringing the exchange’s opening bell surrounded by costumed representatives of the company’s many themed slot products.

In 2004, Bally acquired Reno, Nevada-based Sierra Design Group (SDG), a well-respected developer of gaming devices and systems, primarily for the expanding Class II Native American and government-run central-determination video lottery businesses. SDG also develops and distributes a variety of traditional Class III gaming devices, including the award-winning “Raining Diamonds” video slot which actually dispenses genuine diamond jewelry right on the slot machine itself. With the acquisition of SDG, Bally acquired the rights to the company’s groundbreaking “ALPHA” operating system. ALPHA offers superior game performance, cashless (Ticket-In/Ticket-Out) capability and enhanced player features.

The year 2004 also saw another important development in the history of the company as Richard Haddrill took over on October 1 as President and Chief Executive Officer. Haddrill has served on the Board of Directors for Alliance since April 2003 and most recently completed five years as CEO of Manhattan Associates, Inc., a leader in software solutions to the supply chain industry throughout the world. During his tenure at Manhattan, the company expanded its product offerings and market share, more than tripled revenues to almost $200 million and increased its share price more than eight fold. Mr. Haddrill previously served as President and CEO for Powerhouse Technologies, Inc., a successful technology and gaming company from September 1996 until June 1999, when Powerhouse was acquired by Anchor Gaming, a publicly traded gaming company that was acquired by International Game Technology in 2001.

From a humble, Depression-era tabletop pinball machine that started it all to the 21st century’s latest high-tech gaming products and systems, Bally is back on top as it celebrates more than 75 years as “The World’s Game Maker.” Company founders Ray Moloney and Bill O’Donnell most certainly would be proud.