AUSTIN, TX, October 21, 1998 — OMC Games Division announced that they will begin production of “The Assassin”, which was previously to be released on the Atari 8-bit, for the Atari Jaguar CD game console. With the upgrade in hardware, “The Assassin” will allow for more spectacular effects and a higher level of graphical and audio intensity.

With James Garvin moving to Japan, unforeseen problems arose in the development of the Atari 8-bit version. “I was having some major difficulties getting the antiquated RF system of the Atari 8-bit to work with Japanese coaxial connections as well as technical problems that resulted during my travels from the U.S. Needless to say, I had to make some difficult decisions,” stated James Garvin, owner of OMC Games Division. Though, the change in platforms has not extinguished efforts to bring to life an Atari 8-bit version. “There will be an Atari 8-bit version, but it will most likely have to wait until I get back to the States.”

“The Assassin” is the prequel to “Orb Of Bengazi” which is based on the upcoming futuristic cyberpunk world of “Blood City”, a role playing system to also be released 3rd Quarter 1999. This action/RPG features Chicago detective, Michael Steele, as he searches for the murderers of his brother, but what he finds is a tangled web of intrigue and death which takes him all over the world. For those looking forward to “Orb Of Bengazi”, this game should not be missed.

“The Assassin” will be released under the Hellified Games label of OMC, with the project headed by James Garvin, and music composed by up-and-coming musician, Arthur Lauritsen. OMC Publishing is also planning to release a soundtrack sometime around the release of the game. More news and screenshots will become available over the next couple of months. 

OMC Games Division is a sole proprietorship based in Austin, Texas and publisher of HieroGraphix Game Journal. Other game titles under development include “Age Of Darkness” and “Orb Of Bengazi”. 

1998 OMC Games Div. (http://www.omcgames.com/)(from Area 64: The Jagzone by Heath Anderson)Hasbro Interactive Acquires Legendary Atari Game Property AssetsBEVERLY, Mass. – March 16, 1998 – Leading interactive games publisher Hasbro Interactive, Inc., a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. (AMEX:HAS), announced today that a subsidiary has acquired copyrights, trademarks, patents and other intellectual property assets of the Atari Division of JTS Corporation, giving Hasbro Interactive rights to some of the greatest video games and play patterns ever created for multimedia entertainment. The Atari properties and assets include over 75 game properties including the legendary titles Centipede, Missile Command, Pong, Breakout and Tempest. Hasbro Interactive plans to release its first Atari title this fall with Centipede for both the PC and Sony PlayStation game console.

“We are thrilled that the classic Atari game properties will now be a part of the Hasbro family,” said Tom Dusenberry, President of Hasbro Interactive. “These ground-breaking games helped pioneer the video game industry,” added Dusenberry. “We intend to bring these classics back to life by updating them with the latest technology and interactive game design, while preserving their heart and spirit.” Hasbro Interactive has proven its ability to bring beloved arcade classics successfully back to life with its blockbuster launch of Frogger in 1997 for both the PC and Playstation game console. Frogger, based on the 1980s’ mega video game originally developed by KONAMI Co., Ltd., was a huge hit over the holidays and continues to hop its way up the best-selling interactive game charts.”We plan to implement the same aggressive strategy we used with Frogger, in bringing back the Atari classics,” added Dusenberry. “We will develop games that appeal to the players who loved thetitles as kids, while attracting a whole new generation by bringing the games up to today’s highest standards. Of course, like all Hasbro Interactive titles, they will be backed by major marketing and merchandising programs.”

With the acquisition of Atari’s deep library of game properties, Hasbro Interactive seeks to strengthen its position in the action game category. Hasbro Interactive intends to develop various titles for all viable and available gaming platforms – PC CD-ROM, the Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 game consoles, among others. Background on Some Atari Favorites:The largest insect invasion in history was recorded when Centipede hit the arcades in the 1980s. “Getting the bugs out” was the mission in this perennial favorite. The player launched rapid-fire attacks against persistent centipedes, sticky spiders, mushroom-dropping fleas and poisonous scorpions in order to re-claim the sacred mushroom patch.

No guts, no glory was the motto in the Atari classic, Missile Command. Players needed quickthinking and rapid fire to combat the battalions of bombers, satellites, missiles and smart bombs in this fast-action shooter. Blow them away first – otherwise you’re vapor!

The two games that gave birth to the video game industry were pioneers Pong and Breakout. No fancy graphics were needed in these addictive thrillers – just a good dose of quick reaction and hand-eye coordination would do the job. Pong, the game of “virtual” handball, mesmerized gamers for hours as they battled their friends and foes match after match. Breaking through walls of bricks by ricocheting balls off of a video paddle was the simple, but very addictive premise behind Breakout. The desire to get a better score, kept the early gamers coming back for more. Hasbro Interactive, Inc. is a leading all-family interactive games publisher, formed in 1995 to bring to life on the computer the deep library of toy and board games of parent company, Hasbro, Inc. (AMEX:HAS). Hasbro Interactive has expanded its charter to include original and licensed games for the PC, the Sony PlayStation(tm) and for multi-player gaming over the Internet. Headquartered in Beverly, Massachusetts, Hasbro Interactive has offices in the U.K., France, Germany, Japan and Canada. For more information on Hasbro Interactive titles, please visit www.hasbro-interactive.com. 

Frogger is a registered trademark of Konami Co., Ltd. 1981 KONAMI. All rights reserved. PlayStation and the PlayStation logo are trademarks of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. Nintendo is a registered trademark of Nintendo of America, Inc. 1998 Hasbro Interactive, Inc. 1998 Hasbro, Inc. (Reprinted in Area 64: The Jagzone by Heath Anderson) 

SAN JOSE, Calif. – March 13, 1998 – JTS Corporation (Amex: JTS), announced the completion of the sale of the company’s Atari Division assets to HIACXI Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hasbro Interactive, Inc. (Amex: HAS) for $5 million in cash.

“The proceeds from the sale of these non-core assets will be utilized to support our working capital requirements as we increase our production,” said Joseph Prezioso, Executive Vice President, Finance and Administration, and Chief Financial Officer of JTS Corporation.

The Atari Assets were acquired by the company in July 1996 when the company merged with Atari Corporation and consisted primarily of Atari home computer games and the intellectual property rights and agreements associated with such games.

JTS Corporation is a leader in information storage products. The company designs and manufactures hard disk drives for personal computers, and markets them to leading systems manufacturers and selected resellers. JTS is committed to providing world class hard drives at value prices to support personal computing. The president and chief executive officer of JTS, Tom Mitchell, was formerly the President and Chief Operating Officer of Conner Peripherals and Co-founder, President and Chief Operating Officer of Seagate Technology.

For further information, contact JTS Corporation at 166 Baypointe Parkway, San Jose, California, 95134. Phone: 408-468-1800 Fax: 408-468-1619. Website: www.jtscorp.com (Reprinted in Area 64: The Jagzone by Heath Anderson)

Sunnyvale, Calif — Atari Corp. will score a new level of videogame performance this fall with the introduction of Jaguar, a 64-bit RISC-based system offering realtime 3-D shaded surfaces with texture mapping.The $200 system, able to tap into the growing network of cable and telephone video services, will take videogames into a graphics realm once the province of midrange 3-D workstations. In yet a further departure, the system will be built by IBM Corp.Jaguar, billed as an interactive multimedia system, is based on an Atari-designed proprietary 64-bit RISC processor and its proprietary digital signal processors. The cartridge-based system features 24-bit true color graphics, shaded 3-D polygons and realtime texture mapping. Atari claims that Jaguar offers four times the processing power of the current 16-bit videogames form Sega and Nintendo, and believes it is even more powerful than the coming 32-bit ARM CPU-based machine from 3DO Co. “If a spaceship goes around a moon, or a person walking on a street turns on the next corner, every object, every detail in such scenes is reproduced in shaded 3-D images with texture. It’s truly amazing stuff,” said Atari  president Sam Tramiel.Dense ASICsThe system’s graphics performance is compared by the company to that of the 3-D engines in midrange Unix workstations. And like those engines, Jaguar is based on advanced, very dense digital ASICs.Jaguar’s core consists of two chip sets, one holding the 64-bit RISC processor and the other containing DSP hardware. “But the partitioning between the two chip sets is ambiguous,” said Richard Miller, vice president of research and development at Atari, as the two share some functions. The two sets apparently pack a whole range of components, including controllers, video processors and encoders, leaving outside the core only “a very small amount of TTLs and DRAMs,” said Miller. They were designed at an Atari facility in England, said Tramiel.The 64-bit RISC processor is capable of processing video data at a high rate, handling various video effects as well as full-motion video compression on its own, Miller claimed.Lots of bandwidthAtari would not disclose any more about the core ASICs, such as gate counts or data bandwidth, but Miller pointed out that Atari engineers had to concentrate most of their design efforts on bus bandwidth. “Graphics eats a lot of bus bandwidth. What’s available today for other 64-bit processors such as PowerPC is only just enough for what we want to do,” he said. “What we designed is right up on the level of expensive 64-bit processors.”To meet its cost goals, Atari had to push ASIC technology to the limit. The chip sets will be manufactured by “one of the top four silicon vendors in the world” using the “smallest geometry” available, said Miller. It is believed that with Jaguar Atari has become one of the early customers for a major Japanese 0.5-micron ASIC process, but the company would not confirm this.Clearly, manufacturing volume is essential to the Jaguar plan. The company intends to introduce an add-on PC card featuring the company’s proprietary 64-bit RISC processor, said Tramiel. “It could also help minimize the cost of our chip sets,” he said.Atari is also considering licensing the chip set to other silicon vendors, but has not determined any details yet, said Tramiel.The future holds more integration. But before working on the ultimate, a system on a chip, the next step for Atari’s engineering team is to shrink what is currently a set of rather large custom chips further, reducing the whole system to “one processor, one DRAM, one ROM and one custom chip,” said Miller. The company is looking at both synchronous DRAMs and Rambus DRAMs for future use, “but we are waiting to see some of the standards issues get settled first,” he noted.Miller does have a technological wish list. “First,” he said, “we’d love to have 0.3-micron process technology as soon as possible for custom ICs. Second, we’d like to see some form of synchronous DRAMs appear as a standard commodity DRAM, and, naturally, a very high bus bandwidth to produce higher video performance. The existing improvements for faster bus interfaces so far have been very disappointing for us. Lastly, I’d love to  play the Atari Jaguar system on a 10 x 10-foot display. I’m waiting for a very low cost, low power, large-screen-size display, using probably not anactive matrix but FED-type technology.”In the long run, Jaguar is designed not just as a cartridge-based game machine. It will use a 32-bit expansion port to connect to cable and telephone networks, and a digital signal processing port for modem usage and connection to digital audio peripherals.This I/O structure reflects Time Warner’s 25 percent stake in Atari. “In the course of our product development, we’ve had frequent discussions with Time Warner. It has set the direction for our machine to have cable and telephone connections,” said Leonard Tramiel, vice president of operating systems.The company designed and built a 16-bit prototype home-entertainment machine two years ago, said Sam Tramiel, but scrapped the plan in favor of a grand attempt to leapfrog the 16-bit systems that were then coming onto the market. But when Atari engineers stated to look for enabling technology, “there were no RISC processors and no DSPs that fulfilled our requirements, especially at our cost,” said Miller. Atari’s design team even had to develop its own HDL simulation tools, he said.”People tend to forget that, unlike business users, consumers do have much higher expectations in video quality, speed and cost,” Miller said. “In order to match that demand, we had to really push the technological envelope, driving the chip counts down, designing the system to be highly manufacturable and depending on the smallest geometry process technology.”IBM the OEMAtari will also push the envelope in another way, turning its back on traditional East Asian manufacturing sites and calling on IBM to build Jaguar. IBM, working with a 30-month contract worth $500 million, will be responsible for component sourcing, quality testing, console assembly, packaging and distribution, and will build the system at its Charlotte, N.C. facility. The motherboard will come from an IBM-approved manufacturer, said Herbert Watkins, director of application solutions manufacturing at IBM Charlotte.For IBM, producing the Atari Jaguar system makes it for the first time a major OEM for highly cost-competitive, mass consumer-electronics products, Watkins noted.”To manufacture one of the most sophisticated game machines in the world, we needed someone who understood a high-volume, fast digital machine,” said Miller. “IBM was a natural choice.”According to IBM, the prototypes of the Atari Jaguar system will come out in July, ramp-up models in August and mass-production versions in September. The system will be available first on a limited basis in the fall in the New York and San Francisco areas. A national rollout is scheduled for next year.Additional reporting by Roger Woolnough. (Reprinted in Area 64: The Jagzone by Heath Anderson)