Atlantic City's casino experience is crucial for understanding the expansion of casino gaming across the United States between 1990 and 2007. The casino era in South Jersey wrought wealth and opportunity where very little existed before. Consequently, it represented a model of sorts for the new casino communities around the country, including tribal casinos, neo-riverboat casinos and the thriving casino communities in Mississippi. But the Atlantic City experience also demonstrated that simply opening casinos in a community was no guarantee of success, renewal or stability, despite the almost-certain money that flowed where none or little did before. The Atlantic City experience also provided an exceptional example of a careful relationship forged between local and state governments, local residents and the gaming industry, such that all would eventually achieve their major goals. Yet it took close to fifteen years for Atlantic City to achieve a moderately successfully government–industry partnership, and to some residents at least (albeit a minority), it never was very satisfactory.

The notion of casino gaming on Indian reservations took off in the 1980s when various tribes began offering high-stakes bingo games to raise desperately needed money for their impoverished people. This was not ‘urban reevelopment’ (the catch phrase of Atlantic City's casino era), but something like an attempt at tribal revitalization. Tribes like the Seminoles of Florida, the Cherokee of North Carolina and the Yaqui of Arizona sought to replicate the achievement of the Boardwalk denizens who won the 1976 state referendum that legalized Atlantic City's casinos. They looked towards gambling to improve their tribes economically just as Atlantic City and New Jersey had sought ‘urban redevelopment’. By 1983, approximately fifty of these bingo halls were open around the country, catering to middle-American weekend gamblers who competed for big stakes. In 1984, the Otoe Missouri tribe of northeast Oklahoma opened a 6,000-seat bingo hall and began offering games for close to $400,000 in prizes in one weekend.