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Press Release

WildTangent Announces New Platform for Game Development DirectX creator, Alex St. John, will introduce a new game development platform during the GDC this year

Redmond, Washington, November 23, 1999: WildTangent announced today that it is releasing a beta version of its new platform for Windows game development during the Game Developers Conference. Plans for delivering the architecture to additional operating systems will also be unveiled.

"DirectX is getting a little gray around the temples. The Internet has changed everything about the way entertainment content should be authored, marketed, and delivered," states Alex St. John, WildTangent's CEO and creator of DirectX while at Microsoft. "Today it costs millions of dollars and years of development to create a blockbuster retail title -- that risk and development just isn't necessary. The barrier to entry for developers should be lower, and they should be able to know if they have a hit on their hands long before they've burned millions of dollars. Developers will be able to author games on an episodic basis, generate incremental revenue from online advertising, and when they've created a large enough body of content and fully refined the game play, drop it on a CD and ship it in retail. At the GDC next year we're going to show them how it can be done for little games as well as the leading-edge titles."

"WildTangent's technology returns the game development community to the days when 1-2 talented people can produce leading edge titles on their own," comments Dean Martinetti, president of Rogue Studios, an independent game developer outside of New York City.

The WildTangent "game driver" will be a powerful real-time architecture that includes a 3D engine, character animation, 2D sprite animation, hardware accelerated audio mixing, and massive multi-player functionality. In addition to being a powerful solution for developing standalone applications, the game driver fully integrates access to multimedia hardware acceleration with the major browsers via popular scripting languages including Java, JavaScript, J++, and VisualBasic. Streaming and compression technologies will enable delivery of the most advanced gaming experience over narrow bandwidth connections. Content can also be scaled automatically to perform well on a broad range of PC configurations.

Developers interested in getting a head start on the next generation of game technology can download WildTangent's current product, the WildTangent web driver, which allows web developers to seamlessly integrate 3D multimedia content into their web pages using standard scripting languages. The new game driver will be backwards-compatible for content developed with the web driver. The current web driver can be used to duplicate about 80% of today's multimedia titles for the web in a fraction of the development effort ordinarily associated with creating game content. The game driver will be geared toward addressing the remaining 20%. As with the web driver, use of the WildTangent SDK and distribution of content is free for small to mid-sized developers.

States St. John, "As recent announcements by leading portals and game publishers have demonstrated, the online gaming space is becoming a very important place to be -- and we're already there, with a solution for independent developers as well as large players. We're happy to provide the means for everyone to get a piece of the action. "

About WildTangent
WildTangent, a privately held company located in Redmond, Washington, pursues the vision of building a richer, more communicative Internet experience through the use of 3D graphics, sound, animation, and interactivity. WildTangent launched its web driver version 1.0 in October 1999. Additional company and product information is posted on the WildTangent web site at http://www.wildtangent.com.

Note to editors: For more information regarding WildTangent and WildTangent technologies, contact: Alyson Robin, Director of Marketing at WildTangent, 425.882.7963, ext. 31 or visit the WildTangent web site at http://www.wildtangent.com. Members of the press wishing to be placed on a mailing list to receive updates regarding announcements may send e-mail to [email protected] with "Update Me--GDC" in the subject line.