REALISTIC GAMES
Being Realistic O
From super-successful fruit machine player to slot game provider: Matt Broughton talks to Realistic Games’ founder, Andy Cattrell, about life on the other side of the screen.
f all the company bosses we’ve interview for Casino International Online, very few started out as serious punters before switching to the dark side. However, when it comes to Realistic Games’
founders – Andy Cattrell and Mike Parry – they very much got to grips with the outside of a slot machine before turning their attention to the insides. Regularly found spending their formative years
emptying slot machines in motorway services stations and on cross-channel ferries, this dynamic duo ultimately found themselves banned from almost every casino in Britain (even being featured in The Sun newspaper as “the men the industry couldn’t beat”). Such was their notoriety that companies threw money at them to help design their games rather than destroy them. This work ultimately led Andy and Mike to the formation of their own company, Realistic Games. Andy explains how that insider knowledge proves invaluable…
Casino International Online (CIO): Tell us how
you got into slots. Andy Cattrell (AC): I played my first slot machine when I was 17. I did quite well at hitting the skill feature and won a few quid – that was me hooked, I loved it! Rather bizarrely, I met the co-founder of Realistic, Mike [Parry] whilst we were both enjoying a few slots. We got chatting, clearly shared a passion for slot games, and basically that was the beginning of a long running friendship and business partnership. We’ve both been avid slot players ever since and along the way even managed to work out how to win on a few of the games! We haven’t
always worked together; Mike spent several years designing
54 JULY/AUGUST 2013
slots for a number of the UK’s biggest games manufacturers. He has a real talent for creating exciting game concepts and then bringing them to life.
CIO: What was it that led you to start your own company? AC: The internet came in and with it things like
Flash. We thought we could do something with these new tools and fancied using our experience of being games players and developers to give things a go online. We also felt we had a good insight into what players enjoyed and all these things taken together would give us a chance of building a successful business.
I’d run a few snooker clubs, but we both knew it
was time to give it a go on our own. We trusted in the experience we had with the games and felt that we would learn about the other key elements required to run your own business.
CIO: Was it strange to be on the other side of
the reels, so to speak? AC: No – it was great, and Mike in particular had a
lot of experience of being on both sides of the reels already. I suppose the key difference was that working for ourselves allowed us to make games we wanted to play and hoped that meant others would too. We had the freedom to create new maths models, present games in a way that we thought would best suit the players and take a few more risks.
CIO: What did your background bring to the
table over more conventional folks’ career paths? AC: An understanding of what players want and what they’re looking for in a game. On Roulette, the
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