A game can grow old without retiring. In July 2026, High 5 Games marked 25 years of Green Machine with another edition, Green Machine Blitz. The familiar name returned with a duplication mechanic, collection features and four jackpots. A quarter of a century is a respectable working life for a casino game. Some office chairs have shorter careers.
For Anthony Singer, who founded the company in 1995 and remains its CEO, that anniversary offers a useful way into the story. His business has moved through casino floors, Facebook, mobile devices and regulated online markets. Across those changes, an existing game can become the starting point for another product. The question is what to preserve and what to rebuild.
Singer came to the work through software. He studied computer science at Cornell University between 1984 and 1987. Before High 5, he led a New York consulting business that built custom software for clients including the United Nations and Bank of New York. These were business systems, an earlier chapter considerably removed from reels and jackpots.
That background gives his career an interesting continuity. Custom software begins with somebody else's requirements. Casino content, too, has customers beyond the person pressing play: manufacturers, casino operators and distribution partners. Singer's subsequent career has required him to serve those organizations while keeping a separate audience, the player, interested in the result.
A small studio inside a larger machine
High 5 began with two employees. Its early business developed around creating and licensing games to other companies. The manufacturers supplied routes into casinos; the independent studio supplied ideas and the technology behind them. Over time, its licensing relationships included IGT, Scientific Games, Aristocrat and SEGA. A small developer could earn a place inside a much larger distribution system.
Patents mattered to that arrangement. High 5 argued in a 2020 Supreme Court filing that protection for its game technologies made its licensing business possible. That was the company's position in a legal argument, rather than a guarantee about every invention. It nevertheless explains how seriously Singer's business treated the machinery underneath the artwork.
His own name appears on inventions. A patent granted in August 2017 names Singer, Howard Marks and Daniel Marks as inventors of a system for accumulating and recording game outcomes. Its premise includes retaining accumulated elements for later use on the same or another game. The apparatus has a forbidding title; the underlying problem is readily understood: what happens to progress when a player leaves?
In 2012, the studio released 75 games across land-based, online and social markets, signed distribution agreements with Bally Technologies, Playtech and IGT, and launched High 5 Casino on Facebook. Singer was named to Gaming Intelligence's 2013 Hot 50 afterward. The recognition followed a year in which the company was supplying other businesses and building a direct relationship with players.
Same studio. New places to play.
- 1995High 5 Games founded
- 2012High 5 Casino on Facebook
- 2019Sweden and Denmark expansion
- 2026Alberta supplier expansion
The casino leaves the building
Facebook changed the setting. High 5 Casino brought the studio's games into a social environment in 2012, followed by mobile. Later, the business also operated a Malta-certified real-money casino on its own platform. The company was taking on a wider range of work: making content, delivering it and operating a consumer destination.
In 2013, High 5 announced a second social casino, Shake the Sky, aimed at audiences seeking Asian-themed games. Its planned collection drew on themes from films, television and familiar cultural imagery. The launch made the company's interest in specific audiences explicit. Moving onto a social platform still left the creative team with the question of whose interests a game would serve.
The distinctions matter. A supplier licensing a game to an operator has a different job from a business running the casino itself. Singer's company has occupied both positions. That breadth gave it experience of the player relationship from different directions, along with more operational responsibilities than a catalog of games alone would suggest.
International expansion demanded attention to local tastes. In 2019, Singer described launches in Sweden and Denmark and partnerships with operators including Betsson. He also pointed to games that had performed in Scandinavia before moving to the UK and New Jersey. A successful theme could travel, but he cautioned against assuming that success in one country would automatically repeat elsewhere.
By November that year, Goldstruck illustrated another move. High 5 was developing selected games specifically for online real-money and mobile play, rather than relying entirely on adaptations. The mining-themed title included a wild train feature and support from a promotional engine. The catalog was acquiring products conceived for the screen on which they would first appear.
The price of a second visit
By 2023, Singer was talking about a problem familiar to businesses far beyond casinos: the cost of finding a customer again. “User acquisition is always expensive,” he said. His argument was that a product should provide reasons to return, reducing dependence on another marketing message. The accountant, for once, had a speaking part in game design.
High 5's answer included Rapid Rewards, leaderboards and game features that opened additional levels or symbols. Singer also described plans for jackpots operating within defined time windows. These were mechanisms intended to encourage repeat visits. They should be understood as commercial design choices, rather than evidence that a player was more likely to make money.
The business relationship continued after delivery. Singer described supplying operators with product roadmaps, certification materials, marketing assets and analytics, as well as responding to technical problems. In this account, the game was one part of a service. The operator also needed the practical means to launch it, understand its performance and keep it available.
“User acquisition is always expensive.”
Anthony Singer · 2023
Even entertainment has a file size
A year later, one of Singer's more revealing talking points concerned packaging. In February 2024, he said High 5 had worked to make its games five times smaller on iOS, allowing partners more room to include games in their apps. He framed the change as an upcoming delivery improvement. The claim concerned software size, with no promise that revenue would multiply by five.
It is a pleasingly unglamorous detail in a business full of flashing symbols. App space is finite. A developer can have another game ready and still face a distribution constraint. Singer was discussing the work that makes content easier for another company to carry. It recalls his consulting origins: understand a client's limitation, then change the software.
The people around him describe room to experiment as part of the working relationship. In a 2025 account of her career, High 5 marketing executive Lisa Husniye Singer credited Tony Singer's mentoring, trust and support with helping her grow. Her description adds something the product announcements cannot: an employee's view of how responsibility is shared.
His public description of the creative process is similarly concrete. He enjoys seeing how the company “takes a mere thought and turns it into reality”. The pleasure is in watching an idea acquire a working form. Years of contracts and product launches have apparently left room for that particular satisfaction.
More room for the games.
Relative size, earlier package = 100. Illustration of Singer’s stated plan for iOS packages to become five times smaller; no measured file sizes were disclosed.
The rules beyond the reels
The wider business also brought a serious regulatory setback. Connecticut suspended High 5 Games' online gaming service provider license in March 2025 following alleged gaming-law violations involving its unlicensed High5Casino operation. The dispute concerned the consumer casino operation in a state where the company also supplied content to licensed platforms.
Under a settlement, the company ceased that casino operation in Connecticut and agreed to payments totaling nearly $1.5 million, including more than $643,000 in consumer restitution. Its service provider license was reinstated effective May 22, 2025. Those are company actions and a regulatory outcome; they should not be recast as a personal criminal finding against Singer.
The episode belongs in his career story because it concerns the business he leads and the responsibilities attached to its expansion. A recognizable game, a working delivery system and an operator relationship do not settle the question of permission to operate. Each jurisdiction has its own requirements. The distinction between supplying a licensed casino and running a consumer platform carries practical consequences.
Twenty-five years, and another version
In July 2026, High 5 announced supplier approval for Alberta's commercial online gaming market. It had already supplied games through Play Alberta since 2024. Singer's pitch to incoming operators was straightforward: players in the province already knew the catalog. An established relationship with an audience could become useful when a new distribution opportunity opened.
That same month brought Green Machine Blitz. Creative vice president Jerry Wilson described the task as respecting what players recognized while updating the gameplay and presentation. For Singer, the two announcements belong together. One widened access to existing work. The other gave an established franchise a new installment. Growth arrived through geography and revision.
His ambitions have included more dramatic possibilities. In a July 2021 video interview, he discussed digital gaming, distribution across channels and the possibility of going public to fund growth. More recently, his public LinkedIn remarks about plans for 2025 pointed toward data-driven goals and the use of AI and agentic methods across the business. These were stated intentions, rather than proof of completed changes.
For now, the most tangible thread is the work itself: games revised, software repackaged, partners added and markets approached one at a time. Singer has stayed with that work for more than three decades. Green Machine's anniversary provides an unusually apt ending to this chapter. The company celebrated a game turning 25 by giving its team another game to make.