FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dateline --Atlanta - May 22, 1997
BIG FUN Development Company today took the wraps off its new work-in-progress: RONIN - the Internet Game. Although only a fraction of the full game is now online, the game already shows the kind of fun players can expect to have.
"We want to make it easy to find the game - easy to join - and easy to get hooked!", laughs Dov Jacobson, president of BIG FUN, "Ease of use means you play it right out of the browser - and Java is technology that makes this happen."
RONIN is a massively multiplayer strategy game set in feudal Japan. Players raid each other’s castles using a band of "ronin" - vagabond samurai with a variety of character traits.
"This game is native to the Internet - today's Internet," Jacobson continues, "We designed our way around the speed bumps, and went straight for the good stuff: lots of live players, a living code base, and ubiquitous persistent presence."
BIG FUN maximizes this "good stuff" with a rich political game on top of the battle encounters. Subjugation, surrender and treachery are elements of the "metagame" of feudal alliance which emerges from the simpler game of castle conquest.
RONIN requires new network technology to handle both large numbers of players in a single game and high-bandwidth encounters between individuals. BIG FUN has developed DIGS (Distributed Internet Games Services), technology which superimposes a flexible system over the Internet that dynamically switches between client/server, client/subserver and peer-to-peer connections. BIG FUN is talking with other game publishers about licensing this technology but has made no announcements to date.
"The technology emerging here is fascinating," Jacobson concludes, "but gameplay is always number one!"
BIG FUN is a game studio 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: The Internet Game.