Imaginary Numbers is an independent, privately funded, development studio based in Sydney, Australia. In one sense every number, all mathematics, is imaginary - a number is just an idea, a commonly agreed upon concept referenced by a symbol like "1" or "7308." In another sense, software is just imaginary numbers, floating around in the mind of your computer - and if all software is just numbers, 1?s and 0?s, then computer games are surely the most imaginary of all of them.

Flights of fancy aside, an imaginary number is a specific concept in mathematics - the square root of a negative number. The square root of -1 is represented by the symbol i, and all other imaginary numbers are expressed as multiples of i - the square root of -4 is 2i, the square root of -9 is 3i, and so on. Why are they called imaginary numbers? When the concept was first discussed, the prevailing belief was that there was no place in our number system for the square root of a negative number. After all, what two numbers can you multiply together to get -1? Multiply two negative numbers, and you get a positive number, so the answer couldn?t be negative. Multiply two positive numbers, you still get a positive number, so the answer couldn?t be positive, and what other kind of numbers are there? Eventually mathematicians came to realize that there is more to our system of numbers than meets the eye, and that there is in fact nothing inherently impossible about multiplying a number by itself and reaching a negative result, we just didn?t have a way to describe such a number using our traditional symbols. Hence was born i, and the world of complex numbers!

Imaginary Numbers was founded by Luke Carruthers, an experienced entrepreneur whose past companies include Magna Data, one of the first ISPs in Australia, sold in 1999 for A?16 million, and now part of NTT Australia, and inter-touch, the largest provider of Internet access in hotels outside the US, recently acquired by NTT DoCoMo for US?70 million.

Leading the art department is John Nangle, veteran of numerous titles including Nightcaster for the X-Box, The Lord of the Rings Online TCG, and the unreleased massively multiplayer online RPG Lost Continents.

The engineering team is led by Tess Snider, most recently of Vision Video Games, and further back from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, SAIC, Intermedia, LCI, and the Space Systems Laboratory at the University of Maryland.

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