Cryptologic are a software application provider based in Dublin, Ireland. The company was started in 1995 in the basement of a house in Canada, and grew to the point where it was sold to the Amaya Gaming Group in April, 2012, for a jaw-dropping $35.8 million.
Amaya sold Cryptologic’s consumer-facing casino sites to Goldstar Acquisitionco Inc in February, 2014 for $70 million. This article will brief you on Cryptologic’s success story, then tell you about the company’s most successful and most popular games, and where you are able to play them.
Two Canadian brothers, Andrew and Mark Rivkin, formed Cryptologic in 1995 in the basement of their parents’ house. Between them, they had developed a secure online money transaction system, and were looking for a real-world application where it could be put to use.
Online gambling seemed the perfect field in which secure financial transactions were seen as a necessity, and through a subsidiary called Wagerlogic, the company launched their system for InterCasino in 1996. After branching out into the creation of casino games, they continued to licence their software to other leading gambling brands, including William Hill, Betfair and the Littlewoods Gaming group. Andrew and Mark Rivkin left the company in 2003.
Eventually the business grew to the point where it employed over 300 people and was listed on the NASDAQ. After a few lean years the company was snapped up by Amaya, and dropped all its development on downloadable games to concentrate on ‘in-browser’ play only.
Cryptologic first made a name for themselves with an extensive series of online slots and other games with media tie-ins, such as Batman, Blade, Call of Duty and Superman, as well as a large range of games based on characters in the Marvel universe. The company suffered a blow when Marvel was sold to Disney, who withdrew Cryptologic’s licence to produce such games, meaning the company had to pull a high percentage of its games from casinos overnight.
For many years Cryptologic ran a fairly populated poker network. Traffic at the network peaked in around 2007, but the network was withdrawn in 2009. The Cryptologic poker software was criticised for primitive engineering and functionality, and was considered to be trailing way behind other, more successful networks, such as iPoker.
These days, Cryptologic concentrates almost exclusively on in-browser online slots games.
Despite the downturn in Cryptologic’s fortunes, there are still a good handful of casinos that use the company’s software. Cryptologic’s games can be found at a large number of UK-based casinos, such as Ladbrokes, Paddy Power and Coral. The ‘granddad’ of Cryptologic casinos – InterCasino – is still going strong after nearly two decades.
Here are some of the major developers of software for online casinos:
