Tom Cheredar

UPDATE:   Below is the 2009 April Fool’s Day prank that I wrote last night after watching Jackson Miller and Nicholas Holland win third place in the FastPitch Nashville competition. Of course I couldn’t pull it off without having them keep their lips sealed for most of the day. Hopefully word has spread to everyone about this joke and I hope everyone got a good laugh out of it. If not, let me restate: THIS IS FAKE!

RockStar Games, a wholly owned subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive Inc., purchased a controlling stake in GPS Assassins, an iPhone application currently in beta, according to Centre{source} Interactive owner Nicholas Holland who presented the game at a startup competition in Nashville last night.

An executive at Take-Two stumbled upon the FastPitch Nashville event’s live coverage after noticing it as a trending topic on his twitter homepage. He then e-mailed the developers with an inquiry and his phone number.

GPS Assassins was awarded third place in the competition, which was voted on via text message, but having the event streaming live allowed fate to intervene, Holland said.

“It’s crazy that I almost threw my phone across the room and climbed into bed last night, but I got a strange urge to check it and now I’m a much richer man,” Holland said. He declined to state the amount agreed upon between himself and Take-Two, but it’s rumored to be as high as $500,000. “We just signed and faxed the paperwork off to California so, yeah, this might be Nashville’s first big hit.”

Take-Two was very impressed with the scalability of the game, which is slated to hit multiple mobile phone platforms, including android, windows mobile and of course apple’s OS X mobile. Further versions are also planned to bridge the gap between friends who might not own a smart phone.

Under the agreement, co-founder Jackson H. Miller will retain a 25 percent stake in the game and oversee future development with the Take-Two Interactive team of developers.

“Part of me just wouldn’t let go,” said Miller, who was pleased with the overall deal. “Everybody wins in this case. We get more resources to make the game better and Nashville is still very much involved so its not like we sold out or anything.”

Graphics and User-Interface improvements are expected in future updates of GPS Assassins but the game is still scheduled to make its debut to the app store sometime in April.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 1:07 am and is filed under Tech Industry News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.