Serving Communities, Serving Games
Darryl DeRaedt spent much of his childhood and early adult life in Reno after relocating from Belgium when his dad, Peter, pursued a position with Aristocrat. Even in adolescence,
DeRaedt didn’t see gaming in the cards for himself.
He majored in psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Beginning in his first semester, he spent 13 years in various law enforcement positions after starting out as a student cadet for the university police department.
“It was a new program that the department had started in response to some campus incidents that had occurred,” DeRaedt says. “Cadets offered an extra set of eyes and ears and provided safe rides across the campus.”
After some 18 months, DeRaedt applied for reserve police officer. “I was drawn to the prospect of being able to help my community by being there for someone in their time of need, and to expose myself to a world that few people get the privilege of serving in,” he explains.
DeRaedt graduated from the reserve police academy at 21 and embarked on a part-time position to supplement the police force on patrol shifts and special events on campus. He served as a reserve police officer with the University Police Department Northern Command for 13 years.
He called it a “rewarding personal experience. I’d like to think that I was able to make a small difference within my community. It was an honor to be able to serve next to the men and women who work hard to keep the public safe, in a profession that has had its set of immense challenges over the last several years.”
DeRaedt also felt the experience would work in tandem with his pursuit of behavioral psychology. “In my senior year of college, I had the opportunity to work with severely mentally handicapped individuals that were being taken care of by the state. Our job was to increase the independence of our patients by applying a set of interventions. I’m proud to have done my part, but it was a slow process which unfortunately burned me out from that line of work. After that, I decided that a career in psychology was not for me.”
But the experience taught DeRaedt to interact with people from all walks of life, so he set his sights on a full-time career in law enforcement or business. And that brings him back to his father, Peter, who told him a former colleague was putting together a team for a start-up company.
The colleague, Kent Young, offered him a job as project coordinator in 2012 for Spin Games, a studio that produced slot games. At the time, iGaming was just around the bend, so Spin pivoted into developing a remote gaming server to distribute its own games as well as content from other manufacturers seeking to get into the online space, including Everi. By the time he followed Marshall Adair to Everi, DeRaedt was director of product development at Spin Games.
Adair, a senior vice president at Everi, told
DeRaedt the company intended to develop its own RGS and asked him to join the team. “I had a wonderful working relationship with Marshall while at Spin, so when he asked me to join his team and help build their RGS, I said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ I saw it as an amazing opportunity that I couldn’t pass up,” DeRaedt says.
The offer brought him into a start-up again, “but with the financial backing of a large company,” says DeRaedt, who relaxes by focusing on strenuous activities like hiking and climbing to decompress.
Tapped as a senior program manager, DeRaedt relocated to Austin, Texas to work with a team “directing everything from RGS features and functionality to back-office tooling, to the games’ look and feel, customer relations, and the operational management of it all.” He is now vice president of operations.
In five years, DeRaedt sees himself in a key position “on the supplier’s operations side, helping to guide my company to greatness, while improving the experience from an operations perspective.”
