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News 
Midway Goes Classic
- Posted By Michael
Loewer, 09.18.2001
Midway Games Inc. announced today that it has entered into several syndication agreements whereby it will license classic videogames for play on a variety of emerging gaming mediums, including websites, handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell phones and interactive television.
Companies that have entered into licensing agreements with Midway include:
iWon
Heavy
RuneCraft
Index
Pocket Express
Terra Mobile-iobox.
NOTE: Financial terms of the licensing agreements were not disclosed.
Sangita Verma, Director of Worldwide Syndication for Midway had this to say:
"There is significant interest in licensing our popular classic titles. Midway has rights to hundreds of game titles, including instantly-recognizable arcade hits from the Atari, Williams, and Midway brands. Games like 'Spy Hunter,' 'Defender,' 'Joust,' and 'Marble Madness' are well known and very attractive to licensees seeking high-quality, proven game content."
Is it just me, or does Marble Madness get anyone else all hot and bothered? Ooooh, baby...
Midway announced three agreements focused on the handheld/wireless market. Terra Mobile-iobox licensed the worldwide download rights and retail sales rights in Europe and Latin America to several titles for Palm, Pocket PC, EPOC and smartphones, including: Defender, Robotron: 2084, Gauntlet, Mortal Kombat, Paperboy, Marble Madness, Rampage, and SmashTV. Terra Mobile-iobox is a leading European wireless portal in Mobile Internet services with over 5 million registered users. Pocket Express, one of the fastest growing software developers in the Palm economy, has licensed the worldwide download and retail rights to Spy Hunter, Joust, Tapper, Sinistar and Defender II for the PalmOS platform. Index, a leading Japanese wireless content provider, licensed the exclusive rights to I-mode java versions of several Midway games on any web enabled cell phone in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.
RuneCraft is Midway's first Interactive TV licensee, with an agreement for the rights to Klax, Rampart, and Gauntlet for the ITV platform. On the Internet, iWon and Heavy will each provide versions of classic Midway titles on their sites.
In a final comment by Sangita Verma:
"As technology improves and consumers increase their use of the Internet, interactive TV, cell phones and PDAs, game content will become more and more important. We expect the syndication business to increase in the years ahead."
I look forward with great anticipation to the day when I'm able to pull out my cell phone during class and play classic games while pretending to pay attention. Anyone in high school with a high-end TI calculator most likely has games on it (good ol' AShell and ZShell) and plays them regularly. Thanks to Midway, now we can move beyond primitive calculator games and waste class time in style...
Senior Editor Michael Loewer, signing off.
Shameless Plug: The Necessity
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