TORONTO, Canada – What’s an online sportsbook without casino?

That’s the question we asked ourselves – well, kind of.

Up until last year, Rivalry only offered sports betting on our platform, but we knew casino was an offering our users wanted, and that it could help shape a more well-rounded online betting experience.

When the time came, we wanted to be incredibly thoughtful about adding casino to our platform. We didn’t want to do it the way everyone else does it, we wanted to do it the Rivalry way™. So we asked ourselves:

• How could we introduce casino in a way that stayed true to our brand and its values?

• How could we tailor the product for our audience of digitally native, next generation users that are used to the sexiness and depth of video games?

• What should we avoid at all costs that would make it suck?

We wanted to create a rich and entertaining experience that could add depth to our platform. We didn’t want our casino to be seen as some cheap and lazy cash grab – our users deserve better.

Besides, if we just added a white-label casino with thousands of meaningless games, we’d be just like everybody else. But if we took this project the extra mile, we could do something great.

So we decided to turn the clock back a few decades, doing away with the tired casino metaphor and replacing it with an era of games our community has a shared reverence for: late 90s and early 2000s PC gaming.

That’s right. We’re talking CD-ROMs, Windows 95, Microsoft Clippy, and flashbacks of playing Counter-Strike 1.6 on your parent's computer.

The result was Casino.exe, an interactive environment to house our collection of first and third-party casino games. On Casino.exe, you boot up a retro virtual computer complete with old-school desktop icons, a functional MP3 player, and many more easter eggs.

The aesthetic of Casino.exe is delightfully bizarre. It’s retro and vibrant. Strange and playful. Animated and joyful. And always makes a strong visual impression. We’re engaging a demographic of users born on the internet who watched the evolution of esports happen on PCs of the 90s and 2000s, and we decided to meet them where they are. Casino.exe is a celebration of their PC gaming roots.

We even designed our own custom game box art, striking those nostalgic chords for our Millennial audience and adding a touch of creative irony around the minimal gameplay and poor graphics of traditional casino games. We’re embracing the simplicity of the games and turning the weakness into part of the experience.

Building a functional desktop computer with a bespoke, artificial operating system isn’t easy. If you don’t believe us, ask one of our engineers. But we’re not here to tell you about the work we put in to get here, we’re here to tell you about the opportunities it’s creating.

What Casino.exe unlocked for us is an important layer of design and user experience flexibility that we otherwise wouldn’t have had over third-party casino games. When we spoke about staying true to our brand values above, this is it right here.

Rivalry’s leads from the front with its creative and brand, and our users expect premium and elevated experiences from us. And I'm sorry, but your dad’s sportsbook ain’t it.

The digitally native consumers we’re building for are accustomed to engaging products, interactive entertainment, and fluent in memes and internet culture. The traditional online betting experience won’t cut it for the next generation.

Great product and differentiation are the two biggest talking points in online betting. This is something we’ve believed in since day one, and with an endless sea of sports betting clones on the market, this is becoming increasingly important for operators.

Think about it: what’s the difference between playing Wheel of Fortune from one casino platform to the next? There isn’t one.

But on Rivalry, you have a purple sea creature who shit talks you and an MP3 player with a techno playlist you used to listen to on Limewire before it gave you a virus and destroyed your family computer.

These things seem small, but, in a consumer category where most products are perceived as the same, are incredibly meaningful.