June 28th 1996 - Creative Labs, the leading provider of multimedia products for the PC, has announced that Gremlin Interactive's super-realistic Euro '96 soccer game has been added to the growing catalogue of 3D Blaster compatible titles.

Euro '96 is the official CD-ROM game of the Euro '96 football tournament. Gremlin Interactive, the developers of the universally acclaimed Actua Soccer, have poured a further 4 man-years of effort into the project, resulting in the most realistic soccer simulation ever. As well as a complete replication of all the participating teams and their appropriate squads, Euro '96 features compelling new graphics and special effects. New player models have been combined with almost double the number of motion captures to yield authentic individual player movements, and improved artificial intelligence routines ensure that the playing style of the team as a whole closely matches that of their real-life counterparts.

3D Blaster is the ultimate gaming experience, and the perfect compliment to Euro '96. 3D Blaster incorporates dedicated hardware to accelerate 3D rasterisation and perspective-correct texture mapping, resulting in games that have increased realism and interactivity. When played on a PC with 3D Blaster installed, Euro '96 makes use of the extra power to offer increased frame rates, lower response times and an extra high resolution mode (800 x 600).

"Our market research has shown that the number one requirement of current and potential 3D accelerator customers is support of the latest, greatest software titles. I am therefore especially pleased that Gremlin Interactive have chosen to include 3D Blaster support on the Euro '96 CD-ROM, which is clearly destined to become one of the hottest games this year", said Chris Boyce, Creative's Brand Manager for Video & Graphics Products.

Like other 3D Blaster titles appearing on retail shelves, the Euro '96 packaging includes the distinctive "Powered by 3D Blaster" logo to indicate compatibility with Creative's range of 3D accelerators.

Euro '96 was written to make use of Creative's DOS-based CGL application programming interface (API). This approach ensures that the purchasers of the Euro '96 game will be able to take advantage of current and future versions of 3D Blaster, protecting their and the developer's investment. For example, despite the fact that 3D Blaster-VLB (available now) and 3D Blaster-PCI (available later this summer) are based on completely different chips, from different suppliers and with different underlying architectures, a single version of Euro '96 will operate across both platforms.

In addition to CGL, Creative also supports a number of other 3D APIs, including Microsoft's Direct3D for Windows 95, making 3D Blaster the best supported 3D accelerator in the market.

About Creative ...
Creative Technology, Ltd., is the world's leading provider of multimedia hardware and solutions for personal computers, including sound, graphics, communications and video conferencing products, with its Sound Blaster technology adopted as the world-wide standard sound platform for PCs.

Founded in 1983, Creative Technology's corporate headquarters are based in Singapore with international subsidiaries and affiliate offices in China, Europe, South Korea, Australia, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan and the US. The European head office is based at Ruscombe near Twyford in the UK. In January 1994, Creative opened its European operations and technical centre in Dublin, which provides telephone support for European customers in six languages. Creative Labs Europe has grown eight-fold in the past three years with subsidaries in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, UK, Benelux, Denmark and Sweden. The European operation currently employs around 450 staff.