Monkey Mania

About Monkey Mania

Belmont Park reopened for racing Friday (September 18) following a three-year, $455 million redevelopment, ushering in a new era for New York horse racing.

A sold-out crowd of 6,000 attended the first day of racing at the rebuilt Long Island track, wagering almost $14 million on a nine-race card headlined by the $1 million Jockey Club Gold Cup.

Japanese star Forever Young won the feature race, while all-sources wagering for the day totaled $13,997,422, according to BloodHorse.

What is Monkey Mania?

It marks Spotlight’s first expansion into gaming, combining the company’s global product and content distribution with Engage Games’ platform and track record in free-to-play and pay-to-play games.

Spotlight said the decision to enter the gaming sphere comes as operators increasingly turn towards free-to-play games as a means of “engagement, retention, reactivation and acquisition”.

The games will include fantasy, predictor, survivor and bet builder mechanics, while racing titles will be powered by Spotlight’s Smart View Engine.

How to play Monkey Mania

The increase in capacity is also changing how Cubeia organises its development team. The company is experimenting with a rapid-response team focused on smaller customer requests and incidents, alongside another team working on larger projects and the longer-term roadmap.

The current teams have five and eight people, but Grenstad believes they could eventually become much smaller.

“In my dream, it would be two- or three-person teams,” he says.