Can you guess today's word?
The Gamesys Story — The Company Behind Jackpotjoy
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Gamesys is the operator behind Jackpotjoy, Virgin Games, Monopoly Casino and plenty more. It's the historic name that built the whole family, long before Bally's or Intralot came along.
But the company itself has one of the daftest and best stories in the business. A right rags-to-riches tale, with a twist halfway through that made me laugh out loud when I first read it. The sort of thing you'd never believe if someone made it up.
I'll get to that twist. But let me start at the beginning, because that's where it gets good.
From a Hair Salon to a Gaming Empire
Gamesys was dreamed up by a fella called Noel Hayden, and his backstory is the sort that makes you believe anything's possible. Son of a London hotelier, left school at fourteen, opened his own hair salon at eighteen. Not exactly the CV you'd expect from a future gaming millionaire.
But he got into the internet early, when most of us barely knew what it was. In 2001, with a couple of mates and a bit of money from an earlier venture, he founded Gamesys.
A few software lads in London, building games, back when hardly anyone in the country was paying online gaming any attention. That head start turned out to be everything.
The Birth of Jackpotjoy
In 2002, Gamesys launched Jackpotjoy, and it more or less invented online bingo as we know it in this country. Not just numbers on a screen, but chat rooms, hosts, a bit of community. The social side that made bingo, well, bingo. It's still going strong today, with a whole set of Jackpotjoy sister sites that came along after it.
“In 2002, Gamesys launched Jackpotjoy, and it more or less invented online bingo”
From there they went from strength to strength. Around 2012 they were among the very first to put real-money games on Facebook, always a step ahead of the pack. And in 2013 they picked up Virgin Games from Richard Branson's lot, a household name (which, funnily enough, started life as a Virtue Fusion bingo brand before it settled in with Gamesys).
By this point Gamesys was flying. Jackpotjoy was one of the three biggest bingo brands in the country, sat right up there with Mecca and tombola.
The Bit Where It Sold Its Crown Jewel
Then, in 2015, they did something that surprised a few people. They sold Jackpotjoy, their pride and joy, the site that started it all, to a Canadian company called The Intertain Group. For a cool £425 million.
Now, Gamesys kept running the technology behind it, so it wasn't a full goodbye. But still. Imagine building something from nothing, watching it become the biggest name in British bingo, and then selling it off. That takes some nerve. It hung on to the rest of the family, mind, including all the sites like Virgin Games it had built up.
You'd think that'd be the end of Jackpotjoy and Gamesys as a pair, wouldn't you? Sold, gone, off to a new owner. But no.
What happened next is the daft bit I promised you, and I had to read it twice before it sank in.
