Rainbow Casino is no longer for sale, its parent company announced Thursday.

&#8220We are pleased here at the property to stay in the Bally family,” said Rainbow Casino General Manager Curt Follmer in a statement. &#8220We have put down some pretty deep roots in Vicksburg and the Rainbow team is committed to working hard and continuing to provide an enjoyable entertainment experience for all of our guests.”

The announcement by Las Vegas-based Bally Technologies Inc. came less than three months after developments, including the opening of Rainbow’s new River View restaurant and the start of construction by developers of what will be a competing venue, Riverwalk Casino, just a few hundred feet away.

Riverwalk, being developed in part by former Rainbow developer John R. Barrett Jr. and managed by a Chicago-based consortium of investors, is scheduled to open by late 2008.

In October 2006, it was announced that Bally had hired global financial services firm Credit Suisse to sell its 35,000-square-foot riverfront property at 1380 Warrenton Road. Vicksburg’s southernmost casino was the last of the four now in business to open when it debuted in July 1994. Initially amenities included indoor and outdoor theme park-like attractions. Those businesses, separately operated, closed after just a few years, but Rainbow has expanded its casino at least two times.

Calls to Bally Technologies corporate headquarters in Las Vegas were not immediately returned Thursday evening.

&#8220Obviously we’re happy,” Follmer said. &#8220No change is good for us.”

Analysts who track the casino industry on a regular basis have said Bally Technologies Inc. had listed the property on the market at least once before.

Officials at the Las Vegas-based company expressed confidence in Rainbow’s profitability in Vicksburg despite the impending arrival of Riverwalk and, if financing comes together, a casino and golf complex proposed by Denver-based developer Paul Bunge to the immediate north.

&#8220Rainbow Casino continues to generate solid profits and cash flows for the company,” said Robert C. Caller, its chief financial officer, in a release Thursday.

Mississippi Bluffs, the gaming-and-golf complex, is one of two still seeking licenses from the state to open casinos in Vicksburg. The other is Lakes Entertainment Inc., based in Minneapolis.

Both were given extensions on their site approvals and now must present financing plans to state regulators. Bluffs deadline to present its financing to state regulators is Jan. 18, 2008, Lakes’ is Feb. 15, 2009.

As for Rainbow, it is Bally’s only casino property. The company’s core product is gaming devices, such as slot machines.

Bally’s was known as Alliance Gaming Corp. prior to a March 2006 name change, a move made ostensibly to concentrate more on its manufacturing and technology business. The company touts itself as the world’s top gaming systems company, with about 350,000 gaming machines in more than 600 locations worldwide using its technology.

Its products have been tested at Rainbow in its proving stages, including reel-spinning slot machines, video slots, wide-area progressives and lottery-related games. The company also offers services in casino management, slot accounting and table management.

Started in 1932 as Bally Manufacturing, the company incorporated as Advanced Patent Technologies in 1968.

In its first several decades of existence, it had been on the cutting edge of amusement games, including the fist pinball machine made with &#8220flippers” on the side in the 1940s and was a co-distributor of the 1980s arcade games Pac-Man and Space Invaders.

Thursday, Bally Technologies stock traded at $32.81 a share on the New York Stock Exchange, down two-tenths of a point from Wednesday but well ahead of the $19.31 a share it traded from on Oct. 24, 2006, the day it announced Rainbow was for sale.