William "Si" Redd, who died in 2003, was indeed an interesting character whose significant influence on the development of this city almost won him a place alongside the likes of Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra, and Steve Wynn in the The First 100, our biographical compendium of the most important 100 people to shape Las Vegas.
The entrepreneurial son of an impoverished Mississippi sharecropping family, according to a 2010 biography William Redd's career began at the age of seven when he started selling petroleum jelly and magazine subscriptions. He entered the gaming business aged 18, when he purchased a used pinball machine and persuaded the owner of a hamburger stand to give it floor space in return for half the revenues.
From there Redd progressed to operating lucrative jukebox routes in Boston before moving west to Nevada where, in the late '60s, he landed a job distributing slot machines for Bally Manufacturing. He went on to found his own company, A-1 Supply, in 1975 and a year later acquired sole rights to his former employer's video business. It was around this time that people started referring to Redd as "The Slot Machine King."
The company he founded would undergo a couple of name changes, first (in 1979) to SIRCOMA, which stood for "SI Redd COin MAchines," and then later to International Game Technology, or IGT. In its latter incarnation the company went public on NASDAQ in the early 1980s, by which point it held 90 percent of the ever-growing video-gaming market in Nevada. He was still at the helm when IGT started developing lottery-game technology, a $1 billion industry by the mid-'80s in which his company became a major player. He stepped down as president in 1986, however, amid growing competition from Japan and a slump in the Nevada gaming market, handing over the reigns to Charles W. Mathewson, who turned the company's fortunes around with heavy investment in research and development, an area always close to Redd's heart, which culminated in the launch of the Megabucks linked-progressive jackpot network (see QoD 1/6/2013).
Redd also played a big part in the growth of Mesquite, which he wanted to turn into a gambling destination as big as Reno. He purchased a truck stop and transformed its 28-room motel into the 1,000-room resort-casino Oasis, which he subsequently sold for $31 million.
It wasn't all success stories, and while William Redd has been praised as a genius when it came to sales and marketing, his business acumen has been questioned, with flops including the failed Pride of Mississippi offshore-casino venture that cost him millions. Still, he's remembered primarily as a visionary who played a huge role in introducing such game-changing innovations as video poker and Megabucks, a contribution to the local economy for which he was inaugurated into both the Gaming Hall of Fame and the Nevada Business Hall of Fame.
He died at his beach home in Solana Beach, California, after an extended illness, at the ripe old age of 91.
