these locations or were they virgin territory?
LESLIE:In general, they were pubs and in general
there was already an operator there operating a
jukebox or a slot.
PLA Y METER: How could you determine whether
the location would be suitable or not for video
games in that early stage?
LESLIE: Every location was a suitable video game
location.
PLA Y METER: Is it still that way today?
LESLIE: No, you have to be a little more
discerning. But, in general most pubs are still good
video game locations. And that's where the
majority of our operation lies. In fact, the majority
of operating in toto in England is concerned with
pubs. The brewers own in excess of 70,000 public
houses in England. That's a lot of pubs and a lot of
good sites.
PLA Y METER: Do you encounter problems in such
a situation where you operate equipment with
another operator? Is there any sort of fiction?
LESLIE: Well, you don't operate the same
equipment. We would never operate our video
game alongside somebody else's video game.
Breweries tend to award contracts for certain types
of operations. One guy will operate the slots and
sometimes the music as well, but it's quite often
that one man will operate the slot in a pub, one will
operate the juke box, another will operate the pool
table, if there is one, and still a fourth man will
operate the video game.
And the breweries are aware enough of the
earning powers these days of each individual
the
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innovators of
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machine to know who they want to operate with ,
They want to operate with the operator who will
give them the best possible return. So at that stage,
everybody was going into operating video, but it
was totally virgin territory. There were 70,000
pubs plus every other site you can think of to be
filled, and, of course, there were never that many
machines. So there was no problem.
PLAY METER: But why do you operate video
games exclusively? Why not any other types of
games?
LESLIE: In my original state as Vic Leslie, I
operated video games exclusively because I thought
those were the games I could handle and I thought
they were the games for the future, as well as the
games that would earn me good money. And I had
very little competition. In our current state as the
Cherry Group, we operate video games excusively
in England because we think they have the most
potential and the best earning power. We also still
have a situation in England where there is very
little opposition. So, it's our best move. There is a
great deal of competition in pins, slots, in music and
pool. They're all spoken for to a considerable
extent, and it is very difficult to get a fresh start in
them.
PLAY METER: Why is the competition generally
in England, a far as video games are concerned, so
minimal?
LESLIE: I believe because of our poor economic
tate, the people that got hurt with the original
videos got hurt to such a far worse extent than
operators in America and it made them very
weary of video games. The English operators
invested what to an Englishman was a considerable
amount of money in purchasing equipment which
didn't operate profitably after about four or five
months. I'm ure this is exactly the situation you
had here in America.
The people that had the tennis games went out
and bought 25 to 50 exactly the same, so you had
tennis games in every location. Even when football
came out as opposed to tennis, the same thing
continued to happen. They hadn't yet learned their
les on. So, the reaJ damage was done with the
tenni games and the football games. Because there
were no new games to rotate in , the public lost
interest fairly quickly.
PLA Y METER: What is the location life of a game
today?
LESLIE: We are very ophisticated today in our
handling of the game , but generally we never let a
machine remain on a ite longer than three to four
months .
PLAY METER: 0, how do you keep tabs on what
the e things are, and when it's time to change. It's
pretty well established that video games don't last
any longer than what they did three years ago.
LESLIE: But now we're up to date. I never did
keep that clo e a check as Vic Leslie, as my own
company, but now I am proud to be associated with
probably the large t video operators in the world.
We have brought the operation of video games to a
very ophisticated level. We run a graph on every
ingle game and we monitor very closely the
(cont inu d on page 29)