GameCrafters

In January 2016, a slot called Dragon Born went live on Leo Vegas, distributed through the NYX OGS platform, with a wider rollout to Microgaming and Openbet partners scheduled for April. It looked, at a glance, like another fantasy-themed reel game. What it actually carried was a new reel mechanic from a small Sydney studio, one that would eventually appear on titles from more than a dozen other providers who had nothing to do with building it. A Studio Founded on One Idea Big Time Gaming was founded in 2011 by Nik Robinson, out of a small office in Surry Hills, Sydney. For its first several years it built conventional slots, the standard fixed-reel, fixed-payline format the whole industry used. Dragon Born was different by design: rather than a set grid of reels each showing a fixed number of symbols, its six reels could each independently land anywhere from two to seven symbols tall on a given spin. Multiply the possible symbol counts across all six reels, and the number of ways t...

In November 2012, a Swedish studio that had spent sixteen years building slots mostly seen by players who never learned its name released a five reel game with ten paylines and no bonus round to speak of. Starburst had a gem theme, a wild that expanded and re-spun, and wins that paid in both directions across the reels. Nobody at NetEnt was calling it a landmark at the time. It was one release among many that year. A decade and more later, it is still on the front page of casino lobbies that were not even built when it launched, and the studio that made it no longer exists as an independent company at all. A Slot Studio That Started as Someone Else's Division NetEnt did not begin as a startup chasing a slot idea. It began in 1996 as a division of Cherry AB, an established Swedish gaming and entertainment company with roots in land based machines and casino operations going back decades further. Building online casino software for an existing gambling company gave the new divisio...