Opened ten years ago this week, Venetian Macao remains the city’s modern tourism icon and casino industry bellwether. Typhoon Hato dampened anniversary celebrations but can’t diminish the massive integrated resort’s impact. Venetian Macao fundamentally changed the landscape of Macau, of global gaming, of developer Las Vegas Sands and its founder Sheldon Adelson, now one of the richest people on earth.

Sands Macao, opened three years earlier, brought the Las Vegas casino experience to Asia, and by the time Venetian Macao debuted, Macau had already surpassed the Vegas Strip in casino revenue. Similarly, Adelson began that extraordinary run of increasing his wealth at the rate of nearly US$1 million an hour for two years with the New York Stock Exchange listing of Las Vegas Sands at the end of 2004. But in these events, and so many since in the world’s casino capital, Venetian Macao laid the foundation.

The LVS bid to join Macau’s casino liberalization always centered on building Venetian. Macau’s government desperately wanted a state of the art, Las Vegas style integrated resort; Sands Macao was just a casino with 50 VIP guest suites that weren’t even completed when the tables opened. Former LVS President and Chief Operating Officer William Weidner points out that Venetian Macao took the integrated resort concept further than it had ever gone, adding an arena with 15,000 seats under the same roof with 1 million square feet of convention and exhibition space, a retail mall nearly as big, 3,000 guest rooms and the world’s largest casino. At 10.5 million square feet, Venetian Macao was the world’s third largest building when it launched the gondolas on August 28, 2007.

“Venetian was always going to be in Cotai,” Weidner says. “There was no room for a project of that size on the Macau peninsula.” Cotai, the unfinished landfill around the causeway connecting Macau’s outer islands of Coloane and Taipa, had been a real estate albatross around Macau’s authorities’ neck for decades.

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The promise of a Venetian Macao, a world class resort in Cotai, sold Macau on LVS. So when LVS, strapped for cash after 9/11, submitted its December 2001 bid for a casino concession with financial backer China Development Industrial Bank, a Taiwan bank favored by Kuomintang, the party that led the civil war against the mainland’s ruling Communists, Macau offered a window for applicants to find new partners. When LVS didn’t change partners, Macau’s leadership introduced the company to Hong Kong billionaire Lui Chee Woo’s Galaxy Entertainment Group and urged them to team up. The Galaxy-LVS partnership was awarded one of Macau’s three gaming concessions, even though independent consultant Arthur Andersen rated four other applicants superior. When LVS and Galaxy couldn’t agree on partnership terms, the government produced the creative solution of a subconcession to allow LVS to go it alone.

Venetian Macao inspired Adelson to back the development of Cotai as Asia’s Las Vegas Strip, a concept widely ridiculed at the time. LVS said it would develop all of Cotai, but, according to Weidner, the government insisted that it offer a piece to every casino operator. Supposed visionaries such as Steve Wynn and MGM’s James Murren said no; Lawrence Ho was the only one to show interest, according to Weidner. Wynn and MGM gave Adelson a head start during which LVS banked US$10 billion in Venetian Ebitda, then wound up begging to get on the back row of Cotai. Operators such as Caesars, that missed out on Macau’s licenses, have seen the gap with their Asia active rivals widen.

Since Venetian opened and the snickering stopped, more than US$25 billion has been spent on six more integrated resorts in Cotai, with three further multibillion projects under construction. Last year Cotai accounted for more than half of Macau’s US$27.9 billion in gaming revenue and 63% of the six concessionaires’ US$6.6 billion in Ebitda. This year, Cotai resorts are on track to top US$5 billion in Ebitda. Now, that’s crazy.