NEW PATTERN OF INTERNET GAMING
Direct Player-to-Player Connection Achieved on WWW
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Dateline --Atlanta - Aug 14, 1997


Internet gameplay cleared a major hurdle today. For the first time, players of a Java game slipped seamlessly between a traditional server-based game and true peer-to-peer gameplay.

From a working vacation in San Antonio, Steve Capell, Big Fun's chief technologist, logged into "REIGN OF RONIN", the company's new game where players battle for feudal Japan. His opponents in this test were in Big Fun's Atlanta offices. All played RONIN using Netscape Navigator 4.0. RONIN is a pure Java applet using Big Fun's DIGS technology to enable dynamic connectivity shifts.

In the outer strategic level of RONIN, the various players maneuvered for position on a map of Japan, mediated by the central Big Fun server. But when Capell attacked Castle Yamaguchi, he was in direct head-to-head contact with his opponent, the castle's defender. There was no server involved.

"We had a Mr-Watson-come-here-I-need-you moment," says Dov Jacobson, Big Fun's president, referring to Alexander Graham Bell's famous first words across the telephone. "I saw samurai storming the gate - and it was Steve." The benefits of this technology are great - both for the publisher and the player. The current client-server model excels at logging in players and setting up matches, but when gameplay begins, it presents a tremendous bottleneck. The player pays for this with slow response time. The publisher pays by fighting bottleneck with server hardware. DIGS eliminates the bottleneck completely.

"A massively multiplayer game like RONIN requires enormous computer power and enormous bandwidth," says Jacobson, "Traditionally, the publisher provides those resources. It is very expensive - and it gets worse as the peak player load increases. But think! We already have huge computer bandwidth available, absolutely free. When we have a hundred players online, we have linked a hundred computers. That's a supercomputer. Our challenge has been to create an architecture that exploits this spread-out resource."

Latency -which cripples many Internet games- was imperceptible during the test, even though it used only consumer level dialup Internet services. This is attributed to DIGS and to an Internet-native game design which minimizes the new medium's shortcomings and exploits its huge strengths.

Today's achievement caps eight months of research and development by the BIG FUN team. The DIGS technology will be first seen when REIGN OF RONIN is released commercially in fourth quarter 1997. BIG FUN is also talking to other publishers about licensing DIGS.

"Steve accomplished a major breakthrough," concludes Jacobson, "but he didn't win the game of RONIN. We demolished him at Castle Toyotaya."

True to BIG FUN's policy of open development, the latest version of the game-in-progress is available to the public. REIGN of RONIN can be played now at http://www.bigfun.net.

BIG FUN is a game publisher in Atlanta founded in March, 1996 by executives and staff of the late Turner Interactive. Their 1997 titles include the 3D cartoon race game PIZZA PILOTS (published by Simon & Schuster, and starring Cheech Marin and Cyndi Lauper) as well as RONIN.

BIG FUN is a private company wholly owned by its founders, and currently involved in mezzanine capital formation.

For Further Information Contact:

Sharon Ahmed

Big Fun Development Co.
5115 New Peachtree Rd
Atlanta GA 30341 USA
Tel: (1) 770 454 6770
FAX: (1) 770 454 7373
e-mail: mailto:sharon@bigfun.net
http://www.bigfun.net