Author: by Staff

Multiplayer middleware company Quazal has announced that its suite of packages including Net-Z, Rendez-Vous and Spark! have all been accepted into Nintendo's 3rd Party Tools Program for use on the Wii console. Spark! is the company's 'lobby-in-a-box' solution, with leaderboard and ranking systems that allow developers to have multiple leaderboards with multiple ranking types within their game. Spark! was officially released for the Xbox 360 platform in May of 2007, which lets it run solely on Xbox Live, but share an integration profile with all other Spark! platforms, allowing for rapid cross-platform lobby development. The company's technology was most notably used recently for the multiplayer portion of Harmonix's Rock Band, forming a backbone for its online play, leaderboards, and online bands. Said CTO Martin Lavoie, “We’ve had a lot of interest in the notion of online gaming for the Wii from a number of developers and publishers over the last year. It’s great to now be able to offer our technology and expertise to the Wii development community as a whole, and we hope that this will promote more online development for the platform.”