At present, there is no connection at all. Once upon a time, however, they were all part of Bally Manufacturing, though it came a little late to the casino business. Founded by Lion Manufacturing as a gaming offshoot, the company got its start in 1932 as a pinball-machine maker. It entered the arcade-bowling business, too, eventually manufacturing 837 different types of Bally Bowler machines. A 1965 Bally Bowler can be seen here. So Bally Gaming is the original spore, if you will, of a company that would go on to diversify greatly. The company’s name is inspired by "Ballyhoo," its initial pinball machine. During World War II, the company was briefly diverted into the manufacture of munitions and war materials for Uncle Sam.
Lion floundered after the death of CEO Raymond Moloney in 1958, leading eventually to a 1963 buyout. The next year, in a fateful turn of course, Bally introduced "Money Honey," its first slot machine. During the Sixties, Bally gobbled up rival companies Midway Manufacturing and Guenter Wulff-Apparatebau. It also turned its gaze evermore upon the casino industry. Why, it must have reasoned, merely sell slot machines to casinos when you could not only have the "boxes" but the bigger box in which they sat? This led to the construction and opening, on Dec. 29, 1979, of Park Place Casino Hotel. Although now owned by Caesars Entertainment, it is currently billed as Bally’s Wild Wild West.
You probably knew Bally best through its Midway subsidiary. Do the names "Space Invaders" and "Pac-Man" ring a bell? They were Midway products. In 1983, Bally bought out both Lifecycle and Health & Tennis Corp. of America. It later added American Fitness Centers and Total Fitness Centers, uniting all of them under the Bally Total Fitness brand in 1995. No sooner had they been consolidated than they were spun off in 1996. It would eventually reach an apex of roughly 440 clubs before dwindling to a tenth of that number. But we digress … Five years after the 1980 MGM Grand fire, Bally bought the hotel and rebranded it as Bally’s. It would also acquire the MGM Grand Reno (now the Grand Sierra) and Steve Wynn’s Golden Nugget Atlantic City (now the defunct Golden Nugget). All this expansion put a strain on the company’s finances, and several divisions and assets were put on the block. Alliance Gaming purchased Bally Gaming in 1995 and renamed itself Bally Technologies.
Soon afterward Hilton Gaming’s gaze fell upon Bally Entertainment (the casino division) and won a bidding war for its casinos in 1996. When Hilton subsequently acquired Caesars World resorts from Starwood Resorts, in 2000, it merged them with the Bally’s properties, along with sundry Hiltons, in a new entity called Park Place Entertainment. Soon redubbed Caesars Entertainment, the casino company didn’t stay autonomous. In 2004, it became the target of a successful leveraged buyout by then-Harrah’s Entertainment.
That brings us up to the present. And the pinball business, which Midway abandoned in 1999? It lives on under new owner The Pinball Factory.
