Wednesday, April 30, 2003 | 9:33 a.m.
ATLANTIC CITY -- Rube Goldberg lives -- in spirit anyway.
A new slot machine gimmick that marries gadgetry and luck in a series of clanking, spinning, ball-rolling contraptions was unveiled Wednesday at Tropicana Casino and Resort.
Goldberg, a Pulitzer Prize winner who died in 1970, was famous for drawings of complicated machinery that accomplished little but exerted a lot of energy in doing so.
He was the inspiration for "The Amazing Cash Contraption," a two-story device that sends a bowling ball through a series of chutes, tubes and glassed-in display cases loaded with levers, gears, faux hammers and other bells and whistles.
Eventually, the ball circles an entire slot machine section before landing, which sets off a short animated film played on a wall and randomly selects the number of one of the section's 281 slot machines.
The person playing that machine at that moment wins a jackpot of between $5 and $10,000, as long as they have their personal player card inserted in the machine at the time.
Every 15 minutes, the cycle repeats.
"Creatively, we are constantly raising the bar on ourselves and we've done it again with The Amazing Cash Contraption," said Dennis Gomes, president of resort operations for Tropicana's parent company, Aztar Corp. "No one else in Atlantic City has anything like this new slot area."
The device and slot area, which cost $8 million to build, opened April 4.
The initial lack of signs or explanations of the contraption left one gambler feeling out in the cold.
"How 'bout some signs or some advertising to let us know what's going on?" said Elizabeth Locke, 58, of Oxon Hill, Md., who was playing at one of the machines but knew nothing about the contraption. "There's nothing to explain it to you."
Robert Pieprzak, 71, of Brooklyn, N.Y., didn't know about it either, until a slot attendant notified him that his machine's number had just been selected. He won $3,000.
"Wow. Three thousand dollars?" he asked the slot attendant.
Just then, his wife rushed up, coin cup in hand. "You won $3,000? Sure you did," Renetta Pieprzak, 67, said.
When the attendant told her it was true, she turned back to her husband. "I was on that machine, you know. I gave it to you," she said.
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