From the Birth of Online to Developing the World’s Oldest and Best iGaming Web Development Agency

When I started in the web development game in 1994, my goal was to launch one of the world’s first full-service online design and development agencies. At that stage, I was one of the only people around who knew HTML and how to place a graphic on a page. It wasn’t pretty, but I got it done. I never slept for months, just learning through trial and error. 

Can you even imagine a time with no Google, no YouTube, no videos to watch, and nobody to ask for help? We had IRC chat rooms where we connected with faceless characters using the oddest usernames (we called them Handles in those days). It was in these chat rooms that we shared advice, but people were reluctant to give away their breakthroughs. I must admit, I was just as tight-lipped with my info too.

Through plenty of frustration, I started figuring things out. My biggest achievement at the time was creating an animated GIF! Seeing it flash in front of my eyes with two crude, pixelated frames felt like pure rocket science back in the 90’s.

The First Clients and Missed Opportunities

My first client was a paging company, and from there, I built the homepage for a bank that was the first to go online. Then came a big moment, when the first online casino approached me to build their website. I’ll admit, I felt completely out of my depth. I was nervous about the casino world, so I spent a week designing mockups but never submitted them.

In the end, I never took the project. It was Microgaming’s The Gaming Club, the first online casino. I thought a massive opportunity was missed but it put a spotlight on a road which I was going to venture into.  By the way, I did redesign The Gaming Club multiple times a few years later.

Around that time in 1995, I also built the first online job posting portal and pitched it to top employment agencies. They all told me, “Nobody will go online to find jobs, it’s a bad idea.” Hardly anyone had an email address, and online access was scarce because of dial-up internet. So, the project failed because even people who were looking for jobs had no access to the internet.

Entering iGaming and Finding Our Niche

As things progressed, we started landing interesting clients, a mix of corporate banks, well-known brands and the first wave of internet casinos.

The early iGaming scene was filled with colorful characters, mainly dubious businessmen who ran land-based slots parlors and wanted a piece of the online action. We decided early on that we wouldn’t work with just anyone. We only serviced the top software providers and their legitimate operator brands.

We started with Microgaming operators, then worked with Crypto-Logic (Inter Casino) and expanded to Boss Media clients and other new software providers. The market kept growing, and soon we were working on major brands, including the online casino site for Playboy, one of the industry’s first big mainstream brands.

During this time, I also created Babynet.com, where we filmed and streamed the first live birth on the internet. It was even on CNN! There are plenty more stories, but hey, this isn’t a long campfire session!

Building Stonewall Productions and the Birth of Vegas Kings

My first company was Stonewall Productions. I picked the name as a combination of Stone (representing strength) and Wall (which I thought gave it a prestigious feel, like Cornwall). A few years later, someone asked if I was gay because of the name. I had no idea it was also the name of the first gay rights movement in New York in 1969! But by then, we had built it into a huge success, winning awards and breaking ground in bringing companies online for the first time.

However, I quickly realized that listing both corporate and gaming clients under one brand wasn’t working. When a corporate client saw we had designed a casino or poker site, they looked at us like we were dealing in the underworld and lost a few big projects because of it.

That’s when Vegas Kings was born. During a late-night work session in 1999, my brother and business partner Ashley blurted out the name. It was perfect, and the URL was available. We migrated all our iGaming work to Vegas Kings and kept Stonewall Productions for corporate clients, effectively building a “Chinese wall” between them.

The iGaming Boom and Industry Evolution

In the early 2000s, iGaming exploded. Conferences started popping up, affiliate marketing became a force, and Overture gained traction for PPC advertising, sending gaming sites into massive growth mode.

Vegas Kings took on a huge variety of projects, offering web design, banner design, multi-language creative, custom front-ends for sportsbooks, casino sites, poker sites, bingo sites, and full-game graphics for online slots including conference stand designs.

Even affiliates approached us to build their sites. One of the sites we worked with was the original Gambling.com. We built a strong, diverse team capable of handling everything our clients needed. We worked with operators across the globe, tackling a wide range of challenging projects.

A big stone in the road was seeing the loss of all our American clients in 2006. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) of 2006 caused a massive exodus out of the US. The Act forced the payment providers to halt any processing of online payments and locked up the regulated US market. After 2006, the iGaming businesses changed focus to the already growing European markets.

We worked with many great brands such as Jackpot Joy, Foxy Bingo, Atlantis Casino and so on.

Over the last few years, the US started thriving again, and so has the rest of the world. Vegas Kings have been working with dream clients all over the planet and I am so inspired by our industry. 

Now, 27 years since I first started playing with little pixels and odd lines of code, I’m blown away by what the market has become. iGaming is a mature, powerful industry, well-regulated, filled with brilliant people, and constantly evolving.

I might be a grandfather in the online space, but I’m going nowhere. I can’t wait to see how the industry continues to grow throughout my lifetime and see how new technologies will be leveraged by the brilliant young minds who were born into the tech world.

Bring on AI, new game alternatives and extreme digital immersion…

“The Power Play by Moshe Adir” is released weekly on the Vegas Kings website and LinkedIn. Drawing from nearly 30 years of experience in design and development for online gaming, Moshe shares exclusive industry insights, lessons learned, and behind-the-scenes stories from the evolution of iGaming. Stay tuned for fresh perspectives from one of the industry’s OG!