Greg Enell once helped build a casino in which the chips were virtual and the acquisition price was very real. In January 2012, International Game Technology agreed to buy DoubleDown Interactive in a transaction worth up to $500 million. The casino had launched on Facebook less than two years earlier. For a business associated with spinning reels, it had moved remarkably quickly in a straight line.
The price makes a convenient opening. It also obscures the more interesting question in Enell's career: where will people go to be entertained next? His work has followed the places casual players gather, from online games to Facebook and then into virtual reality. Across those changes, the audience has mattered as much as the machinery. A game needs somewhere to live. A business needs people to turn up.
The casino came to the customers
Enell arrived at DoubleDown with experience at Microsoft and WildTangent. He had also founded G12 Interactive, a casual games company later sold to Big Fish. His next company therefore grew out of an existing Seattle games community. Glenn Walcott, formerly Big Fish's chief financial officer, became DoubleDown's president. Charles Harper, whose background included RealNetworks, ScreenLife and WildTangent, joined its development leadership in 2011. There was considerably more experience behind the Facebook app than its youth suggested.
Enell and co-founder Cooper DuBois financed DoubleDown using profits from an earlier business, Pickjam. The venture became profitable in four months. That gave the founders a particular kind of independence: they could keep building with money the business generated. The familiar startup sequence of raising a round, announcing a round and preparing for another round had some competition from customers buying virtual chips.
DoubleDown Casino launched in April 2010. By November, the company said it had more than 100,000 daily users and was adding over 10,000 new players a day. Players could advance through levels, earn badges and appear on leaderboards against friends or the wider community. The casino supplied recognizable games; Facebook supplied a setting in which people already knew other people. A trip to the tables required rather less planning than a weekend in Nevada.
The product grew by listening as well as distributing. In April 2011, DoubleDown added video poker after requests from users. Its daily audience then exceeded 300,000. Slots, blackjack and roulette already provided a range of familiar choices. A player could arrive for one game and find another without leaving the same app. For Enell, this meant building a destination with several reasons to return.
Your friends, now appearing on the reels
By September 2011, DoubleDown was reporting more than a million daily players. Its audience could send virtual chips to friends, and the company said players had exchanged more than $100 billion in free chips within weeks of that feature's arrival. The denomination belonged to the game. The exchanges mattered because they gave people something to do for one another inside it.
Photo Booth Slots pushed that idea into the game itself. Players could personalize reels with as many as eleven profile pictures of themselves and their friends. Matching faces won virtual chips. Wins could be shared, friends invited and chip gifts sent. The social network became part of what appeared on screen. An ordinary slot symbol had to compete with somebody you might have had lunch with.
There was a commercial logic beneath the joke. Facebook offered identity, connections and distribution in the same place. DoubleDown could use those features to make familiar casino mechanics feel personal. The company described Photo Booth as its eighteenth integrated title. More games created more occasions to play; the friend features supplied occasions to invite somebody else along.
Half a billion, with conditions attached
The IGT agreement paired two different kinds of knowledge. Enell's team understood a social audience. IGT had studios, established casino content and an international gaming business. At the time of the announcement, DoubleDown had 4.7 million monthly active users, up from 3.3 million the previous October. IGT was buying an existing route to players, rather than waiting for a new route to acquire its own traffic.
The headline figure came in three parts: $250 million in cash, $85 million in employee retention payments over two years, and as much as $165 million over three years if financial targets were met. The word “up to” deserved its place beside $500 million. A conditional payment is an invitation to keep working, however festive the acquisition announcement may feel.
Enell explained the strategic appeal in terms of content. IGT could develop slots for DoubleDown's platform and bring recognized casino brands into the social setting. The agreement also called for him to continue leading the business from Seattle, with an appropriate degree of operating independence. The founders had sold the company; the job of running it continued.
By May 2012, IGT was bringing themes such as American Idol, Wolf Run and Cleopatra to DoubleDown. Most users played free, Enell explained, while some paid to extend their entertainment. That distinction was central to the original product: customers could buy virtual chips, but the social casino did not offer cash redemption. Understanding what the customer was buying mattered more than the resemblance to a casino floor.
A growing company still needs programmers
In June 2012, Enell received Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur Of The Year award in the Pacific Northwest's social gaming category. The award was presented at a gala in Bellevue. His response spread the credit across the company: “This is a team award.” More than a hundred people worked at DoubleDown by then. Even the neatly singular word “entrepreneur” had acquired a substantial supporting cast.
“This is a team award.”
Greg Enell / June 2012
By December, the practical details had become almost comically tangible. DoubleDown's new Union Station space combined casino carpeting with Northwest wood paneling. Around 150 seats were occupied, with room for 180. Enell was recruiting Java and JavaScript developers while moving the front end toward HTML5. A large acquisition could buy a company, but apparently it could not make Seattle's competition for programmers disappear.
That work carried on through 2013. When IGT confirmed the founders' departures in January 2014, it said DoubleDown had launched more than fifty games across desktop and mobile during the previous year. The product was available in French, German, Italian and Spanish. It had also been the highest-grossing social casino on iPad in 2013. The Facebook business had learned to travel.
Enell and DuBois left together, two years after the deal. Walcott followed the next month. Their departure separated the founding chapter from the company's subsequent corporate history. It also freed Enell to consider another audience, another device and another very different timetable.
The next room had music in it
Presence Labs, which Enell founded in 2015, took him into virtual reality. The studio's stated ambition was consumer entertainment for an international audience. GrooVR, its music experience, recorded its first commercial use on Christmas Eve that year. Familiar songs would now accompany unfamiliar places.
GrooVR used a listener's music to animate virtual environments on Samsung's Gear VR. Producer Patrick Bulman's team built predefined journeys whose elements responded to the audio. This was an accessible proposition for somebody who loved music without necessarily wanting to master a game. Put on the headset, choose something to listen to, and let the surroundings change.
The engineering demanded restraint. Gear VR ran on a compatible Samsung phone, and rendering two views placed pressure on a mobile device's resources. Artists and developers had to make their ideas fit. Concept artist Alex Pelayre's work included environments, characters, props and effects for experiences such as Ocean Deep and The Runner. The imaginary world still had a hardware budget.
At South by Southwest in 2016, NPR's Laura Sydell tried GrooVR with Presence's Steve Shaw. Listening to electronic music, she moved through images of oversized flowers and a lake beneath changing clouds. Her account supplies a useful picture of the product's appeal: a piece of entertainment could be absorbing without supplying enemies to defeat or a score to chase. The listener's existing music did some of the inviting.
The difficult business of being early
Enell was financing Presence himself in 2016. He wanted to reach mainstream consumers through mobile VR, but recognized that the audience remained small. The lesson he had to apply was financial as well as creative: hiring faster could not make headset adoption happen faster. Arriving early meant paying for time.
One experiment brought back an old favorite. Presence released Fireworks Lady Liberty for Gear VR before the Fourth of July in 2016. Enell remembered fireworks-themed slots helping DoubleDown's early growth. In the new experience, viewers watched a roughly seven-minute display around the Statue of Liberty. A successful seasonal idea had crossed from reels into a surrounding world.
Years later, an industry acquaintance supplied a quieter postscript. In a December 2025 interview, gaming executive Marcus Yoder recalled dismissing DoubleDown's founders when they first approached him at IGT about licensing games. After the acquisition, Yoder said, Enell kindly refrained from pointing out his mistake. It is a pleasing detail in a career full of virtual wagers and actual negotiations: sometimes the most memorable thing a founder does is decline to say, “I told you so.”