Andrew Gellatly profiles one of the leading lights in software development, Chris Derossi, and hears his ambitious plans for the future of online gaming...

In the course of a spectacular 20-year career trajectory in Silicon Valley, software maestro Chris Derossi has been chief architect of the Macintosh operating system and was closely involved in the creation of high-flying companies like ePeople and PDA pioneer General Magic.

But Derossi was also among the first of a crowd of silicon valley engineers to pick up on poker before it caught the public interest, making his recent transition to co-founder of fast-rising gaming software business CyberArts Licensing an almost inevitable one.

His perspective is Olympian, and one senses he is willing the online gambling industry to lift off, like an enthused scientist at a shuttle launch. “We haven’t yet scratched the surface of what the user interface can do,” says Derossi. “Today no-one has really taken advantage of the internet - the ability to interact with a truly large number of players, to make changes at computer speed, without the need for human adjudication - that will dwarf anything we’ve seen online before.”

While Derossi estimates that technology won’t be ahead of the gaming industry for too much longer, he does argue that there is a natural pace of player evolution and expectation. “Poker isn’t a game that lends itself to a lot of experimentation,” he says. “You can’t make major changes without breaking boundaries. Some poker skins have attempted to go to completely rendered 3D worlds, but real players tend to dismiss that after two or three hands, and ultimately the only thing that matters it that the user interface doesn’t get in the way of the game play.”

There is of course always room for improvement.

“In the early days of online poker, the user interfaces available were poor, and were transferred straight from a non-computing background,” says Derossi. “It’s not until the second or third generation that software applications really begin to take advantage of the technology. We’re building products for licensees that really push the technological envelope - you’ll be seeing those rolled out from major names over the next few months.”   

For Derossi, the lessons learnt from a high-flying enterprise computing background are proving absolutely germane for an online gaming industry struggling to get to grips with needs for security, scalability and globalisation.

“Our licensees are demanding the kind of fail-safe scalability that lets our systems handle tens of thousands of simultaneous players - without crashing,” says Derossi. “They require software like they get from Microsoft and Oracle - with the highest levels of reliability - and built-in fraud and collusion control that lets them safely move millions of dollars around the world.”

Building on his Macintosh operating system background, Derossi also argues that authoring the CyberArts Foundation platform brings with it a whole raft of cultural understandings that can only benefit online operators and their players.

“The challenges of globalising are much larger than programmers who haven’t done it can imagine. These are business-driven needs. When we shipped the Mac operating system it went out simultaneously in 23 different languages. So we built into the CyberArts software the ability to create multiple language skins, even in tough double-byte languages like the Asian and Middle Eastern ones, quickly and easily,” he says.

So while the adoption of new online games in markets such as China may be at the mercy of regulation and law, technology itself should not prove to be a barrier. “The products that the biggest players want to purchase now,” says Derossi, “will soon be used at a scale they have never been used at before - in terms of the number of simultaneous players, and the penetration into markets the globe over."