ATARI AND EPIC GAMES’ UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004 DEMO BECOMES ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR GAME DOWNLOADS OF ALL TIME; POSTS MORE THAN 1.5 MILLION DOWNLOADS WORLDWIDE IN FIRST WEEK

LOS ANGELES – Feb. 20, 2004 – Gamers worldwide have made the trial version of Unreal® Tournament 2004 one of the most popular game demo downloads of all time, with more than 1.5 million downloads in the first week of availability. The demo first hit the Internet on Wednesday, February 11, and was distributed on a worldwide scale.

According to statistics tracked by Web sites offering the demo, more than 1.5 million users accessed the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo in the last week alone. Graphics card maker, NVIDIA®, which hosts the demo on its own “nZone” gaming portal, reports that more than 140,000 gamers have downloaded the demo from their server. FilePlanet.com, one of the most popular online video game download destinations, reported more than 110,000 downloads, making the Unreal Tournament 2004 download one of the fastest demo downloads to reach 100,000 in the site’s history. On most gaming sites offering the download, the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo is maintaining its position as the top download.

“We are really proud and excited to see the fans of the Unreal franchise embracing the all new gameplay elements in Unreal Tournament 2004 in such overwhelming numbers,” said Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games. “As a company, we focused hard on making a game that was more than just an incremental improvement and could meet our standards for breaking new ground in terms of gameplay innovation and multiplayer competition. Clearly, as PC gamers everywhere have demonstrated, Unreal Tournament 2004 stands to redefine what it means to compete online.”