Mere Mortals Is Super, Smashing, Great

A North East games development company has stepped up to the oche to create what is fast becoming one of the best selling games this Christmas.

Newcastle-based Mere Mortals created PDC World Championship Darts for clients Oxygen Interactive and the game is receiving rave reviews from retailers and the trade - being placed at number two on the pre-order list on play.com a week before its release.

PDC World Championship Darts, which is the only darts game on PS2, offers users a realistic darts experience based on the PDC darts competitions and features lookalikes of ten of the world's leading darts players including Phil Taylor, John Part and Alan Warriner Little.

The project was a year long in development for the Mere Mortals team who used Z Brush and Maya to build the character models based on photographs of the individual players.

The game is played using the analogue thumb sticks on the Playstation 2 controller. The dart movement dictates the force of the throw, rather than the 'on' or 'off' of the digital method.

Multi-player options enable up to four people to play as a team or compete against each other using the programmed variants of the standard rules of darts.

David Jeffries, Managing Director of Mere Mortals group of companies which operate from 4000 square feet of studio space at Hoults Estate, Walker Road in Newcastle said: "I am absolutely delighted with the reception the game has received."

"As momentum for the project has built and rave reviews have started flooding in, higher profile players and sponsors have come on board."

"This is a very exciting time for Mere Mortals. We're consistently exceeding clients' expectations. I'm delighted."

ENDS

December 8th 2006

Note to news desks

Mere Mortals group of companies now employs 32 people over three different visual image disciplines and is the largest organisation of its type in the North East.

For further information please contact Lorraine Surtees at Sorted PR on 0191 265 6111