Media Contacts:
Marisa Osorio (lacoqui@aol.com)
Neal Sofge, Fat Messiah Games (neals@aol.com)

Mar. 8, 2002
For Immediate Use

START SPREADING THE NEWS: FAT MESSIAH GAMES HEADS FOR THE BIG APPLE

Tired of smog, earthquakes and traffic jams, Fat Messiah Games is moving its headquarters to the home of the Yankees, subways and great pizza.

"My wife and I decided to move back to New York City in order to settle down and raise a family," explained Neal Sofge, FMG's Super Genius. "With Mike Wasson's departure in early 1999, I'm the principal operator and so the company has to follow me."

Fat Messiah Games has always been, in Sofge's words, "a loose association of talented artists, designers, game enthusiasts and other riff-raff." Email was used as a collaboration system from the very beginning, through arcane gateways between America Online and the Internet. FMG's products were created entirely digitally starting with Last Frontier: The Vesuvius incident in 1993. The company further decentralized while producing Trilobite and the Hard Vacuum series, with design, development, testing and editing all occurring throughout the United States.

As a result of this distributed Internet-based model, FMG company operations will be minimally affected by the move. Darrell Hayhurst's design work on the next Hard Vacuum expansion and Jeff Siadek's development of the limited-edition Lifeboat parlor game will continue on schedule in their respective cities. Even the long-awaited Insecta:3 project is finally back on track, teaming up new lead designer Chris Carlson with veteran Philip Eklund for a projected first release this fall.

Almost all company communications are handled through email, allowing the FMG staff to continue interacting with customers and suppliers as they have been without major changes. Finally, with Wizard's Attic filling all Fat Messiah orders from its Oakland and Kentucky locations, customers will have uninterrupted access to FMG products even while the company is boxed up and on the road.

Sofge is sad to leave Southern California, FMG's home base for more than a decade. "I would like to thank all of our customers for their support throughout our years in Los Angeles. We will continue to provide the same unique products from our new location. I will also miss the great game conventions here, without which we'd never have gotten off the ground."

Fat Messiah Games, based in Los Angeles, Calif., has been producing unique fantasy and science fiction adventure games since 1991. FMG products feature tactical richness, innovative mechanics, and high playability.

-FMG-