More than a quarter century after Steve Wynn kicked off a new chapter in Las Vegas history with the opening of his flashy Mirage resort, he will return to the iconic property for a public reflection of sorts.
The casino mogul is set to give a special keynote address at the outset of a major four-day gambling conference at the Mirage in June. Organizers of the 16th International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking anticipate his comments will center on the so-called integrated resort model that made the Mirage, and many other properties afterward, a hit.
UNLV’s International Gaming Institute will host this year’s conference June 7-10, and it’s expected to draw some 500 researchers and intellectuals from around the world, according to the university.
The conference was started in 1974 by the late Bill Eadington, former director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at UNR. Held once every three years, the gathering last took place at Caesars Palace in 2013.
Attendees this year will hear from a host of important academics, regulators, industry experts and others over the course of the conference, which organizers described in a statement as the “world’s oldest, largest, and most prestigious event in the gambling studies field.” But Wynn’s speech is the marquee event.
Bo Bernhard, executive director of the gaming institute, said organizers chose the Mirage as the location of this year’s conference because of its singular place in casino history. With its ambitious attractions, large-scale entertainment and traditional casino offerings ambitiously put together on a grandiose scale, the Mirage has been widely regarded as a transformative force since its opening in November 1989.
Bernhard said it’s almost unfathomable to think that the resort has now passed its 25th birthday — a milestone that practically makes it a senior citizen by Las Vegas Strip standards. “In 1989, it really did rock the hospitality and gaming world when this entirely reinvented concept was opened,” Bernhard said of the Mirage. “For (Wynn) to come back to the Mirage, a place that’s no longer technically his, but speaks to a quarter-century of what this all means ...for a nerd like me, that’s an intellectual dream.”
The Mirage drew attention for its major nongambling attractions such as a 54-foot volcano, a domed glass atrium with a lush vegetation inside and a regular Siegfried and Roy show. The resort combined those with the with the usual trappings of a Las Vegas resort — slot machines, table games, a large supply of hotel rooms — and prompted others to follow in its footsteps.
Wynn once told the Las Vegas Sun that about the time of the Mirage’s development, he had a “black book, a folder, that was about 120 pages,” which included an “exhaustive examination” of how various business segments worked well at other hotels.
“And in this book was the most comprehensive financial analysis that showed that what we were doing already existed in Las Vegas in three separate hotels: 2,100 rooms at the Hilton, 2,000 rooms at Bally’s and 1,300 rooms at Caesars,” he said. “Every single aspect of our program was responsible for huge success at one part of those hotels or the other, but they did not exist in one place.”
Still, even at the time of its opening, the Mirage’s impact was understood to be a game-changer.
The Los Angeles Times, for example, reported that the resort had “triggered a huge refurbishing boom by nearby competitors scrambling to keep up” and that it was “leading the way for a new breed of monster-sized casino resorts planned for the Strip that...will broaden the city’s appeal beyond its present base of gambling and conventions.”
After the Mirage, Wynn continued to make waves on the Strip by creating Treasure Island and the Bellagio. He lost control of all three in 2000 when his company was acquired by MGM Grand Inc. (now MGM Resorts International), but he went on to develop the Wynn Las Vegas and Encore on the Strip. His company, Wynn Resorts Ltd., also has property in Macau and plans to build a resort near Boston.
Wynn Resorts spokesman Michael Weaver couldn’t say exactly how many times Wynn has returned to the Mirage since the MGM acquisition, but he said the speech this year will mark “a rare return.”
The speech will also come as Wynn once again talks about making a big change to the landscape of the Strip. Just last week, he revealed plans to build a new 38-acre lagoon attraction, a 1,000-room hotel tower and more on land that now houses a golf course behind his Strip resorts. The development is tentatively called Wynn Paradise Park, and Wynn has said he wants it to “reinvent Las Vegas.”
Bernhard said the mogul’s tone now is similar to what it was more than 25 years ago when the Mirage opened.
“Certainly, that is something that is used in developer-speak all the time,” Bernhard said. “But there are some developers who can legitimately lay claim to reinvention, and he’s one of them.”
Registration for the gambling conference is open to the public. The regular fee is $725 until May 20, and the student fee is $245.