First tell us a bit about Reality Gap in general.

Reality Gap is a publisher of online games and the creators of the MetaTIX(tm) microtransaction system. We have about 20 employees in the Seattle Washington area, with additional programmers and operations in South Korea, Canada, and Europe as well as Southern California and the East Coast. Our mission is to publish innovative online games and to grow the MetaTIX customer base through our own games and third party microtransaction based games, and to become a world leading games payment system provider.

How did the idea for Battleswarm come about?

Early on in the company's history, the founders (Michael Williams, Nolan Bushnell, and myself) discussed a few different types of games that seemed to lend themselves well to the business models that we were looking to create. Collectible tradeable games, smaller scale MMO's with in-game economies, and medium session tournament style games were all set as targets. Battleswarm was one of about 200 titles that we looked at from all across the world to publish, and we all immediately saw that it met several of our top criteria. First and foremost, it hadn't been done before. In today's market, if you don't have $20 million to spend on development and another $10-20 for marketing, you'd better have something that can get some attention by being different and innovative. I think that Battleswarm clearly shows the world a new game mechanism, and we're really happy with it.
Secondly, it needs to lend itself well to microtransactions, tournaments, and in game economies. With our consignment store, Cash store, regularly scheduled tournaments and persistent character system, it clearly stands out as a serious contender in the free to play, microtransaction based games market. Last, but not least, it needed to be done to high quality standards and have a great development team that could adapt quickly to our various markets demands, and Gameworld Tech Co LTD has been a great partner to work with and are top notch developers.

Some of the early publicity about the game centered around Nolan Bushnell. What was his involvement in the game?

Nolan has been an active board member and inspiration throughout the companies 30 month history and even before. He was involved in establishing our initial criteria for publishing, was on the greenlight committee for the selection of titles, and has been involved in our efforts to bring titles to the English speaking world that really suited this market. It's been great working with Nolan as he genuinely understands interface and game design, and has been helpful in the design discussions, especially as it pertains to the commercialization and tournaments, and also with a lot of the future plans for Battleswarm that we have not announced yet.