EVE ONLINE will be simultaneously published in North America by Simon & Schuster Interactive and in Europe by Crucial Entertainment (Rated "T" by the ESRB) on May 6, 2003.

"This is a very big milestone for EVE as we are getting close to the game going gold," said Reynir Hardarson, art director and co-founder of CCP Games. "We're pleased to announce that within a week's time we will be dropping the NDA for our beta testers. We cannot thank our testers enough for all their dedication and bug hunting to help make EVE the best MMOG this year."

Dr. Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, lead game designer at CCP also comments on EVE reaching Beta Phase 7. "We are now entering the final phases of play testing, where all the components of the game and player run economy come together. With the increased number of users we will see how the game will evolve towards being a truly self-sustained community on the scale of a small country."

About the New Servers

EVE ONLINE will be hosted on brand new, state-of-the-art servers. These servers will enable CCP to host up to 100,000 gamers in the same world.

Chief Technology Officer of CCP, Hilmar V. Petursson explained how these new servers will benefit EVE. "The benefit is just more power for the players. The construction of our cluster load distribution allows us to scale very high at the application server level, allowing for more simultaneous players than previously seen. Our fully-distributed game infrastructure scales by allowing EVE to acquire more computing resources as they are added to the cluster, this is greatly assisted by our use of Stackless Python helping to divide up game-play in a flexible way to best take advantage of the server nodes available."

Nathan Richardson, project manager of EVE at Iceland telecommunications company Siminn who are running the server cluster and customer support commented on the geographic placement of them. "The EVE cluster is strategically placed, Internet topology vise, allowing us to equally cater for U.S. and EURO players, which is important given the fact that all play in the same game world."

BECOMING A BETA TESTER

Gamers who would like to become an EVE ONLINE beta tester can sign up via the EVE ONLINE web site. Beta testing will continue until EVE ships to retailers in May. To date more than 135,000 gamers have signed up.