In February 1980 the first issue of this magazine, then titled simply Gaming Business, arrived on the desks of the people who ran and regulated legitimate, licensed gambling in the United States. What that meant at the time was pari-mutuel betting and publicly owned lotteries, peppered here and there with some small-stakes commercial and tribal bingo, and the commercial casinos of Nevada and Atlantic City, those at the Jersey Shore having been open less than two years. That was the industry, and Gaming Business, styling itself “The Management Magazine for Gaming Executives and Government Officials,” covered all of it.

“We will offer you information and opinions on marketing, operations management, finance and investment, personnel, new technology, advertising and promotion and licensing,” founder Irv Babson promised.

No one had ever attempted this. Probably no one up to then had seen the need.

The big stories in Vol. 1, No. 1 — the New York Racing Association was testing some new consumer marketing; state lotteries were in a quandary over how best to advertise (“Is television worth the expense?”); bet-taking at the nation’s tracks was about to be computerized; and a Texas real estate baron and oil man had ridden in to Atlantic City to save Bob Guccione’s Penthouse Casino Hotel, which had ceased construction amid “rumors of financial difficulties” and development costs that had ballooned from $60 million to an astonishing $150 million.

There was a Democrat in the White House, and all the talk was of a looming recession, the consequence of a protracted slump that had first manifested itself under his Republican predecessors, when interest rates had begun to climb and credit markets tightened amid rising trade imbalances and an inflationary spiral unleashed by the collapse of the post-World War II economic order and the costs of the Great Society and the Vietnam War and the Arab oil embargo.

Was the industry, in the parlance of the time, “recession-proof,” as was widely believed? What about the specter of federal taxation? (That first issue took off after a plan the IRS was floating to require track operators to withhold income tax on winnings.) And with politicians everywhere hustling to rein in state budget deficits that were soaring as a result of the downturn, were casinos about to proliferate nationwide?

Babson, who also would go on to create the industry’s first trade show (the International Gaming and Business Expo), had grasped the significance of what the economic winds were blowing gambling’s way.

“We are competing against a host of individual and mass entertainment forms for our patron’s leisure time and disposable income,” he wrote in his first Publishers (sic) Letter.

At the same time he saw that “the different segments of the industry have become more competitive with each other,” and as he saw it, out of a “diverse group of wagering operations” there was emerging a “single industry”.

State governments were “alive to the need to franchise gaming operations as a source of tax revenue,” and this created a need for “more sophisticated information about the gaming business.”

Government, Babson was convinced, “must take a supportive role in gaming management.”

Above all, the industry and its investors and stakeholders needed a place to go to keep abreast of important trends, share information, learn from one another and educate these governments because their growth would be determined by the degree to which elected officials were prepared to relinquish old prejudices and embrace the business with licensing, regulation and taxation policies that were open, fair, rational and realistic.

I never met Babson. He was no longer with the magazine by the time I arrived in Las Vegas in July 1995 to take up my first full-time job covering the industry as an editor and writer for a competing magazine. “Competing” is a presumptuous way of putting it, actually. International Gaming & Wagering Business — the “International” had been added to the title at the start of that year; Gaming Business had become Gaming & Wagering Business in 1984, when it also adopted the tabloid format it would retain ever after — was the bible. We couldn’t begin to match the breadth of its coverage, its comprehension, its worldwide reach. The best we could do was try to be different, to be good at being smaller (a lot smaller, to be honest).

Ironically, here I am, now its editor, charged with the sad duty of reporting that this issue of IGWB is its last. The magazine summoned into existence by an industry that needed to find its way in an era of unsettling economic and cultural change has after 29 years, two months and 350 issues succumbed to those same profound forces.

But it’s a new era and a very different industry, isn’t it, and of necessity these demand new responses.

Ours is Casino Journal — as strange twists go, the very “competitor” I started with back in the summer of ’95 — which will be coming to you next month not only completely redesigned but expanded with more features and sections, more product and property highlights and all the international news and in-depth analysis you looked for in IGWB.

Strength is a function not only of the ability but a willingness to move forward with the times. Surely, as the titles themselves testify — Gaming Business, Gaming & Wagering Business, International Gaming & Wagering Business — they wouldn’t have had it any other way.