The history of the world's biggest lotteries

Spain's Christmas lottery, best known by its nickname El Gordo ("the fat one"), traces back to the early 19th century, making it one of the oldest continuously run lotteries anywhere. It's less a jackpot-chasing game in the modern sense and more a genuine national tradition: tickets are shared among friends, families, and workplaces, and the annual December draw is a televised national event. Its format — many smaller prizes spread across a huge number of ticket numbers, rather than one enormous jackpot — reflects that community-tradition origin rather than the "single life-changing win" design of newer games.

The UK National Lottery launched in 1994, after the UK government created a licensing framework for a nationwide game (operated under licence by a commercial operator, rather than run directly by the state). It introduced lottery play to a huge new audience with a simple pick-numbers format and a portion of every ticket sold going to a fund supporting arts, sports, heritage, and community projects across the UK — a "good causes" model that several other national lotteries have since adopted in some form.

EuroMillions launched in 2004 as a joint venture between the national lottery operators of France, Spain, and the UK, later expanding to include several more participating countries. Pooling ticket sales across multiple countries lets the game support a much larger jackpot than any single country's lottery could sustain alone — a structural idea that's since been echoed by other multi-jurisdiction games elsewhere in the world.

In the US, both major multi-state games evolved out of earlier, smaller-scale predecessors rather than launching fully formed. Powerball's lineage traces back to a late-1980s multi-state game that was restructured and rebranded in the early 1990s into the format recognisable today, with a large main-number pool plus a separate Powerball drawn from its own pool. Mega Millions followed a similar path in the mid-1990s under an earlier name before adopting its current branding and format shortly after. Both operate as multi-state compacts: individual US states opt in to sell tickets and share the resulting prize pool, which is how both games are able to advertise jackpots far larger than any single state lottery could fund on its own.

Not every country's lottery scene started with a single national game. In Australia, for instance, individual states ran their own separate lottery operators for decades before national-scale games with the reach and jackpot size to compete internationally emerged — a pattern of "many regional lotteries first, one bigger shared game later" that shows up in several federated countries, not just Australia. It reflects how lotteries are usually licensed and regulated at whatever level of government has that authority, which doesn't always line up neatly with national borders.

For most of the 20th century, a lottery draw meant a physical ball machine, often filmed for a live television broadcast so the public could watch the result happen in real time — partly for excitement, and partly because a witnessed, filmed draw is easier to trust than one that happens behind closed doors. As lottery formats diversified into faster, more frequent games (some drawing multiple times a day), many operators shifted at least some games to certified random number generators, which can run far more often than a broadcast-friendly physical draw ever could. Major flagship jackpot games have generally kept physical ball draws precisely because of that trust and spectacle value, even as smaller or more frequent games moved to digital draws. See our piece on how lottery draws actually work for more on how each method is kept fair.

The idea of directing a fixed share of every ticket sold toward public funding — arts, sports, education, or community projects — rather than treating a lottery purely as a revenue-raising exercise, has spread well beyond the UK. Several national and state-level lotteries around the world now publish, in some form, how much of every dollar, pound, or euro spent on a ticket goes toward such causes versus the prize pool and operating costs. It's part of why lotteries in many countries are run under government licence or directly by a public body, rather than as an ordinary private gambling business — the funding mandate is usually baked into how the operator is licensed in the first place.

Despite their different starting points, nearly every major lottery has drifted toward the same broad shape over time: a large primary number pool for a big, headline-grabbing jackpot, plus a separate smaller pool that multiplies the odds (and the potential prize) further. It's a format that balances two things every lottery operator wants — long enough odds to let jackpots roll over and grow, and a still-tractable enough number pool that plenty of smaller prizes get won along the way, keeping the game feeling winnable even when nobody hits the top tier.