Microsoft's Age of Empires® Creator/Lead Designer Launches New Web Site

For Immediate Release

July 1, 1998 - Rick "Mr. Grinch" Goodman, the creator and lead designer of Microsoft's Age of Empires®, has announced a new web site devoted exclusively to Age of Empires and its millions of hard-core fans -- http://www.mrgrinch.com.

Why this new site? Mr. Grinch explains, "First, I would like to personally thank everyone who helped to make Age of Empires a success. Secondly, after shipping AOE in October, I spent a month surfing all of the game's fan sites, and what I found is that there's a tremendous amount excellent content, but I had to really work to find it. For example, if I wanted to get strategy tips for the Egyptian Campaign, I didn't know where to begin looking. It occurred to me that there was a better way."

After considering this situation, Mr. Grinch devised a solution. He created the Age of Empires "Yellow Pages", where all of the game-related content on the Web is listed by topic. "I wanted to make the Yellow Pages a place where gamers could go in order to find anything and everything about Age of Empires," said Mr. Grinch

The Yellow Pages includes 300 of the best Age of Empires links on the Web, and is organized by topic, allowing players and fans to quickly find what they are looking for. Once a player identifies a topic of interest, the Yellow Pages provides direct links to specific AOE fan site pages located around the globe.

"My goal is not to compete with the numerous high-quality AOE fan sites already in operation, but to simply enable players to quickly and easily find whatever they may be looking for," explained Mr. Grinch.

The Yellow Pages will be constantly updated. New links will identified with a "New" banner, so that gamers will be able to quickly browse through all of the new content. The site will also be spotlighting one Link each week at the top of the page.

Mr. Grinch's AOE web site is now online. Point your browser to: http://www.mrgrinch.com. Since creating Age of Empires, Mr. Grinch has founded a new game development company, Stainless Steel Studios, and is currently developing a new real-time strategy game called Empire Earth®. For more information about Stainless Steel Studios, visit the company's web site at http://www.stainlesssteelstudios.com.

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Microsoft's Age of Empires is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Mr. Grinch, Stainless Steel Studios and Empire Earth are trademarks of Stainless Steel Studios, Inc.