Online bingo has exploded in a way that most of us could never have anticipated, just as its real life predecessor did almost 80 years ago.

It all started with the lotto, which has been played since 187 B.C and can be traced back to a Chinese Dynasty - some even believing the game helped finance the Great Wall of China.

It’s been said that the first real strains of bingo started in Italy in 1530. Back then, it was called something we can’t pronounce but which translates into ‘The Clearance of the Lot of Italy’ – a numbers game which basically paved the way to the lottery they still play today.

As it spread to France, about 200 years later, it became known as the far easier to pronounce, ‘Le Lotto’, which was played exclusively among the rich. Around the same time, Germans began using the numbered game to teach math and spelling in a way that was catchy and popular among students. Bingo reviews back in the day would have earmarked the game as a useful tool for kids.

As it hit American carnivals in 1929 it started going by the name ‘beano’, as beans were used to mark off numbers on cards. As the story goes, the game caught the eye of a salesman named Edwin Lowe who renamed the game after hearing someone accidentally scream ‘bingo’ instead of ‘beano’ mid-play. He then coined the term and, with the help of a maths professor (who later went insane), reworked the cards to have additional number combinations so it could be marketed on a more challenging scale.

As soon as the game started becoming more popular, a Catholic Church priest approached Edwin Lowe and asked if it could be used to raise money for the Church… which it did, and it exploded massively from there.

From something obscurely Italian, to lotto, to beano, to bingo and then to online bingo, it seems the multibillion industries have been unstoppably popular from day one.