Magnetar appoints Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) inventor to its advisory board.

June 18, 2004

Vancouver, BC, June 17, 2004--Magnetar Games Corporation is very pleased to announce that Tony Parisi, co-inventor of the well-known Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) and co-chairman of the world leading 3D standards organization, Web3d (www.web3d.org), has joined Magnetar as an advisory director.

Magnetar is developing FederationX, which is a federated game portal and lobby system based on X3D (the current version of VRML promoted by Web3d), and the modeling and simulation standard High Level Architecture (HLA) developed by the US Department of Defense (US DOD). FederationX is the world’s first high-level standards-based initiative for games, and will compete with proprietary technologies such as WebDriver, by WildTangent (www.wildtangent.com).

Magnetar is exploring a strategic partnership opportunity with Tony Parisi’s company, Media Machines (www.mediamachines.com), which would see the “Flux” player as the X3D engine for FederationX games. Magnetar is also developing a 2D “Mirage” engine using Flash, which also uses X3D and HLA technology. Media Machines and Magnetar share a common vision of making X3D and HLA the standard for the game industry. They hope to leverage off the rapidly expanding interest in the use of X3D for real time visualization in order to promote a major game standards initiative.

Magnetar laid the cornerstone for the HLA aspect of FederationX through development of the advanced network engine “Chronos”. This platform is suitable for games and simulations, and is currently being tested at John Hopkins Applied Research Laboratory for level II verification on behalf of the US DOD. Chronos is the first purely P2P solution for distributed Flash applications and uses Microsoft’s DirectPlay as a lower level network layer.

Magnetar also recently released their federated game lobby solution, “Tryst”, into beta. This will enable third party “Federates” to participate in the global community-owned FederationX Network. Magnetar’s vision is that game fan sites and independent developers will be able to actively participate in developing an open system as an alternative to exclusive aggregation systems, such as www.gamespy.com. As FederationX is further developed, high-level real-time collaborative authoring tools based on the X3D/Flux/Flash Portal technologies will promote the development of new games that use the new standards. For more information please visit Magnetar Games at www.magnetargames.com.

Duncan Suttles
President
Magnetar Games Corporation
5775 Toronto Road #809 V6T1X4
Tel (604) 2243998
Fax: (604) 2244620
Web: www.magnetargames.com

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