The Man Who Wrote The Fanfare For Winning Less Than You Bet
Soren Halloway has scored eleven slot machines. His proudest work plays when a dollar spin pays back forty cents.
Soren Halloway works in a soundproofed room at Hartwell Lowe Gaming, outside Reno, surrounded by eleven slot machines he can no longer hear as anything but rough drafts. As head of audio, he decides what a machine says to you when the reels stop. He agreed to talk on the condition that we did not touch anything with a lever.
What does a machine play when someone bets a dollar and wins forty cents? A fanfare. Four bars, mostly brass, with a little waterfall of coins at the end. The coins are the important part. People feel the coins.
But they lost sixty cents. They won forty. I’m not in the subtraction department. My job is the moment, and in that moment something came out of the machine and the machine was proud of them. I don’t think it’s my place to take that away.
I’m not in the subtraction department.
The sound of losing
And when they lose the whole dollar? Nothing. We tested a sad trombone in 2019 and people walked away within minutes. Silence works better. Silence says go again without making it weird.
Do you play your own machines? Once, for research. I knew every sound and every probability on that cabinet, because I signed off on half of them, and I still stayed six hours. That’s when I knew Thunder Badger Deluxe was finished.
On our way out, a machine in the corner paid twelve cents on a two-dollar spin and played what Halloway identified, with some emotion, as his Ode to Partial Recovery. He asked us to stand still until it was over.
