InterCasino (1996)

The early product was a downloadable client rather than a web page. Players installed the software, connected to the casino's servers and played a small set of games — slots, blackjack, roulette — rendered by the client and settled by the server. CryptoLogic's contribution was the payment and account layer, the piece that had stopped earlier experiments from handling real money.

The claim of "first" is contested. Microgaming's Gaming Club launched in 1994 and also claims the title, and several sites offered play-money or partially functional gambling before 1996. What distinguishes InterCasino in most accounts is the combination of a licence, a secure payment system and a verified real-money wager.

InterCasino established the division of labour the industry still runs on: a software supplier providing the platform and games, an operator running the brand and the players, a jurisdiction providing the licence. CryptoLogic went on to supply many operators, and the supplier-operator split became the template that platform providers, aggregators and white-label businesses follow today.

It also demonstrated the core economics. A casino with no floor, no staff at tables and no geography could reach players anywhere the law allowed, at a marginal cost close to zero — which is why the following decade saw hundreds of operators launch from offshore jurisdictions.

A player in 1997 downloads the client over a dial-up connection, registers with a credit card and plays blackjack against the server. The operator has no physical premises beyond an office in Antigua, the software house takes a share of revenue, and the entire operation serves players on three continents from a handful of servers.

• Free Trade & Processing Act (1994) — the licence it launched under.
• Microgaming — the rival claimant to the first online casino.
• RNG (Random Number Generator) — decided outcomes then as now.
• HTML5 — the technology that eventually replaced downloadable clients.

Compare today's platform suppliers in the Platform Providers category.