For the two decades, online casino sites have provided a variety of games. Although, prior to this, trying your chances at the classics wasn’t as easy. You couldn’t simply log into your favourite online casino. Instead, you’d have to travel to your local land-based venue and queue to play the games you fancied.
As technology has advanced, improvements have been made to both land-based and online casinos to ensure gameplay is as smooth, fair and authentic as possible.
With this in mind, let’s delve right into the history of casinos, to see exactly where the popular online games originated, and where they’re going.
The first land-based casino
The first casino dates back to 1638 in Italy. Originally a theatre that hosted gambling games during the intermissions of plays, the Casino di Venezia started the casino craze in Venice in the 1700s.
Over the next few centuries, brick-and-mortar casinos cropped up all around Europe, including the iconic Monte Carlo Casino in 1865.
At this time, gaming venues in America had begun to rise in popularity. Plenty of our favourite casino games, like Blackjack and Poker, became available to play in the first legalised gambling houses in New Orleans, in 1820.
Slots in Las Vegas
As land-based gaming continued to evolve and the infamous Las Vegas Strip steadily grew from the 1940s onwards, the next notable advancement in the casino industry was the first electromechanical slot machine, in 1964.
This led to technological advancements that would help develop the first video slot in 1976, by a Las Vegas based company called Fortune Coin. This slot game used a 19-inch Sony TV for the display, and could be played in the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel. Once the machine had the approval from the Nevada State Gaming Commission, it became widely popular on the Strip.
A digital era
The introduction of digital Slots, alongside computers and smartphones meant that the first online casino sites could open between 1994 and 1996. This birthed the digital gaming era, with more and more games becoming available to play on-screen.
Despite this, graphics were fairly simple, and internet speeds would not cater to the graphics, special features and speeds played at today.
Continued advancements
Thankfully, technology continued to develop, and gaming developers did well to keep up.
Nowadays, there are more variations of games online than you could ever imagine, as well as live casino games. These are hosted directly from a specialist studio, by a real-life dealer, in real-time. But it gets better – some of these games are now available in Virtual Reality (VR)! This means you can view the game through a simulation, actually placing you in it, as long as you have access to the internet and a VR headset.
And this is clearly just the beginning of the future for online casino gaming. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll be able to visit the Casino Di Venezia without having to leave your home?
