REALITY GAP™ ANNOUNCES VIRTUAL CURRENCY FOR EVERYONE
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
SEATTLE, Wash. – May 27, 2009 – Reality Gap, Inc., today announced that after two years of development and testing, its virtual currency system, MetaTIX™, will go live on July 1, 2009, with the launch of Monato Esprit™, a massively multiplayer online game.
MetaTIX™ was crafted as an open solution for online games seeking to meet the enormous demand for small, fast transactions in online games. Current solutions are impractical due to excessive fees, including minimum transaction fees and charge backs, imposed by payment gateways.
The inspiration for MetaTIX™ came when the company’s founders, Michael A. Williams, J. Mark Hood, and Nolan Bushnell, discussed the history of arcade tokens. Nolan, who is the founder of Atari® and commonly referred to as the ‘father of the interactive entertainment industry’, explained the reasoning behind arcade tokens and their application at places such as Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza-time Theater, which he also founded. It struck Mike and Mark that a digital online solution would be even more powerful and could create a unified market for low-priced games, overcoming the fees charged by payment gateways.
“The game industry demands a solution to this problem. If the payment gateways had a solution, the massive demand for increasingly inexpensive product would have forced them to deploy it by now. Solving it required re-thinking transaction processing from the bottom up and the result is no less than a change in the very nature of online games,” said Michael Williams, CEO of Reality Gap.
MetaTIX™ is integrated into Monato Esprit™, a massively multiplayer online game, which launches on July 1, 2009. It will be followed by Battleswarm™: Field of Honor™ in September 2009. Other first-party games will launch every few months thereafter. Additional games developed by third-parties are expected to launch beginning this fall.
The system is intended to be a open solution available to all game developers and publishers. The architecture is capable of handling millions of simultaneous transactions and does so at a nominal cost. Just like the arcade tokens of yesterday, this is intended to be a universal platform for delivery of online games.
About Reality Gap, Inc.
Reality Gap is a publisher of massively multiplayer online games and the developer of MetaTIX™, a virtual currency for online games. The company was founded June 14, 2007, by Michael A. Williams, founder of Tremor Entertainment and Planetwide Games; J. Mark Hood, co-founder of Capital Entertainment Group and former Senior V.P., Core Games for Sierra Online; and Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari® and Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza-time Theater®.
www.realitygap.com ### Reality Gap and MetaTIX are trademarks of, Virtual Currency for Everyone is a service mark of, and Battleswarm is a copyright of Reality Gap, Inc. Monato Esprit is a copyright of Reality Gap, Inc. and Gamasoft, Co., Ltd. Field of Honor is a copyright of Reality Gap, Inc. and GameWorld Tech, Co., Ltd.
About Reality Gap, Inc.
Reality Gap, Inc. (www.realitygap.com) was founded in June 2007, by Michael A. Williams, J. Mark Hood, and Nolan Bushnell. Their mission is to open the online game world to user generated content, through a series of initiatives including a virtual currency, in-game property rights, and episodic content. The company is based in Seattle, Washington.
Reality Gap, Inc. and Monato Esprit are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Reality Gap, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.