The new Santan Mountain Casino on the Gila River Indian Community in Chandler, Arizona is a 160,000-square-foot gaming destination featuring over 800 slot machines, 25 table games and lots of amenities. The casino has restaurants and bars, a nearly 7,000-square-foot vibrant ballroom and the state’s largest casino sportsbook. Santan incorporates non-traditional design elements that depart from traditional casino aesthetics. The interior features white and vibrant colors, and along the front façade are expansive windows that provide sweeping views of the desert landscape and abundant natural light during the day.
“We took the rulebook for a dark, dungeon-like casino and threw it out,” said Santan Mountain Casino General Manager Blake Katsnelson. The casino’s unique design approach also spills over to its use of high-impact LED displays. It’s only fitting that the largest sportsbook in Arizona would have the largest sportsbook LED video wall. Designed by Immersive Studios and installed by technology integrator Immedia, Santan’s BetMGM Sportsbook is comprised of three Planar TVF Series LED video walls with a 1.8mm pixel pitch, mounted side by side—creating a 129-foot-long continuous LED display.
Surrounding the central Hive bar is a custom-built halo LED display—a 58-foot-long, five-foot-high (19-foot-diameter) Planar CarbonLight CLI Flex Series LED video wall with a 1.9mm pixel pitch. During sporting events, like football, the halo LED display can be divided into sections to show multiple games simultaneously. The casino also created custom marketing content for the display including animated videos and digital art. “We look at it as another guest service initiative that takes the whole experience to the next level.” The halo LED video wall allows the casino to tie into the branding connected to the property,” says Matt Clist, Project Consultant, Immedia.
The Gila River casino ownership gave the team the freedom to expand upon the project vision as they saw fit explains Art Vivas, Director of Innovation & Design, Immersive Studios, whose team also designed the halo. For example, in the initial talks, Gila River expressed interest in hosting a DJ and using the sportsbook as a space for entertainment. Vivas and his team used that idea to set up the large Planar LED video wall as a vibrant canvas for a DJ to tap into. “It becomes a giant, captive surface for abstract imagery or live videos,” Vivas said. “Kick it up with a high-end performance sound system and now you’ve got an entertainment venue.”
