It's Not Rocket Science

One of the newer faces in online gambling software design is a small company in Glasgow, Scotland, that goes by the name It's Not Rocket Science.

INRS is a 22-person firm that made its name in standard Web design (home pages for corporations and the like). The company recently decided to tackle the Internet gambling market and has worked with Global Dip Gaming to design three sharp-looking gaming sites: "The Venetian Gold," "Slots and the City" and "Paddys Gold."

John Muir, head of project management for INRS, said his company stumbled across gaming design in 2001, when it was chosen by Global Dip, a Costa Rica-registered company, to design the software for its gaming sites. Global Dip now manages the sites. Muir said Global Dip brought the casino expertise to the project and INRS brought the design expertise.

"Using (Global Dip's) knowledge and expertise made it a lot easier to develop the games themselves, to the point where we're all kind of specialists now in online gambling--and the games, as I found to my great delight when I went to Las Vegas recently for the Global Gaming Expo," Muir said.

Muir said every part of the three gaming sites is automated, to make them as easy as possible to manage for the client. Slots and the City was recently nominated for an Electronic Multimedia Award (EMMA). The awards, whose winners will be announced at the end of November, are given to examples of creative technical and professional development of digital media.

In terms of payment processing, INRS developed the gateway infrastructure needed to integrate a variety of payment mechanisms, such as PayPal and NETeller, into the gaming sites. The gaming sites are in Flash and include a complete administration system.

"We do all the integration work," Muir said. "It's actually if you imagine that Global Dip wanted to develop a casino but had absolutely nothing, and It's Not Rocket Science had developed everything from scratch."

The company two weeks ago landed a contract to work with Gala Interactive on new "soft betting" games for the galagames.com site. Muir said the games will launch in the beginning of December and will cater to people who aren't drawn to traditional casino games.

"It's really on the basis of trying to attract a different target audience to online betting," he said. "People are not necessarily interested in playing blackjack or poker because they're scared of it, but they don't mind actually betting online."

Muir said the company, which is owned by The Coltas Group of Glasgow, said INRS's involvement in games development was initially centered on football games, platform games and viral marketing games.

"We kind of stumbled across (online gambling), to be honest," Muir said. "The original aspect of gaming that we've done was very much the soft gaming."

The group's online gambling involvement has jumped from 30 percent to 60 percent of its business in the last four months. Muir said they are pushing the Internet gambling side of their business because now is the quiet time for corporate Web site design.

"The online gambling side is going very well, especially with the gala win that we got last week," Muir said.