The Mirage Hotel opened on 22nd November 1989, and the Strip has never been the same since. Whilst Las Vegas Boulevard had seen mega-resorts before, such as Kirk Kerkorian’s International and MGM, a young Steve Wynn raised the stakes with his Mirage and started a trend that transformed 1990s Las Vegas.

Steve Wynn’s Vegas career started in the 1960s when he took a minority stake in the Frontier Hotel and made a dollar and a cent as a liquor distributor. It was as manager of Downtown’s Golden Nugget in the 1970s that he really cut his teeth in the casino business. He went on to build a Golden Nugget in Atlantic City, and next came the Mirage.

The Mirage is a 3,000 room casino hotel, notable for a man-made volcano that stops people in their tracks as they walk past. As soon as it was launched the hotel started grossing a million bucks a day, and Wynn’s reputation for delivering outstanding product was cemented. The high quality of service, design and build quality are what set the Mirage apart from the casinos that had gone before it.

William Bennett is another important figure in 1990s Las Vegas. After buying Jay Sarno’s Circus Circus and turning it into a cash cow he went on to build the 4,000 room Excalibur. Aimed at a lower market segment than that Wynn was chasing, it became an instant hit when it opened seven months after the Mirage.

At this stage in the Strip’s evolution it was time for Kirk Kerkorian to step back into the fray, and he did so in style by building a new 5005 room MGM Grand. This one billion dollar project opened in 1993 and went after all market segments with success. At the same time as Kerkorian was working on MGM, Wynn was building Treasure Island, and Bennett was developing the Luxor. Between them these three men were transforming the Strip. The tail end of 1993 was dramatic indeed: 9th October, Luxor opens; 27th October, Treasure Island opens; 18th December, MGM Grand opens.

These hotels recognized that Las Vegas visitors were no longer gambling-focused men, but families looking for entertainment of all types. With this new broader market to tap, new hotels continued to be built through the 1990s: Excalibur (1990), Rio (1990), Luxor (1993), MGM Grand (1993), Treasure Island (1993), Hard Rock (1995), Monte Carlo (1996), Stratosphere (1996), New York, New York (1997), Bellagio (1998), Mandalay Bay (1999), Paris (1999), Venetian (1999), new Aladdin (2000). 1990s Las Vegas. What a decade.

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