The Frontier-LV "Gold Rush Card" is regarded as the one of the first (or maybe THE first?) casinos to have a machine-readable slot card program, starting in the late 1970's.

The Golden Nugget-AC (1982) followed by the Golden Nugget-LV (1983) had a paper-ticket player reward program connected to its machines. The GN-LV issued 1 ticket (worth 50c redemption) for every $75 coin-in. That program was followed later by an upgrade to a full-feature slot card program.

Harrah's Marina-AC had one of the first full-feature player tracking / rewards systems, named "Captain's Circle", in 1985. In conjunction with Electronic Data Technologies company, this system filed some of the first patents on slot card systems.

All of the above systems were preceded by various casinos' VIP card systems which had paper or plastic ID cards, but did not actually connect to a machine. In fact, these were more commonly used with table game players.