Companies that have entered into licensing agreements with Midway include iWon, Heavy, RuneCraft, Index, Pocket Express and Terra Mobile-iobox. Financial terms of the licensing agreements were not disclosed.
There is significant interest in licensing our popular classic titles, said Sangita Verma, Director of Worldwide Syndication, Midway. 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.
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.
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, said Ms. Verma. We expect the syndication business to increase in the years ahead.
SOURCE: COMPANY PRESS RELEASE
