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Has your tech company played coy with a potential suitor lately? You may want to rethink your reaction.

In the past four months, Oracle, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts have all launched high-profile, unsolicited buyout bids for reluctant targets. Such efforts are otherwise known as bear hugs.

Oracle put the squeeze on middleware competitor BEA Systems in October; Microsoft did likewise with Yahoo at the start of this month; and on Sunday, EA made a play for rival game publisher Take-Two Interactive Software.

Did someone forget to put the lid back on the honey jar?

In the case of Oracle, it … Read more

I'm not usually one to get up for something happening at 5 a.m. PT, but in the case of this morning's Electronic Arts conference call to discuss its proposed $2 billion takeover bid of Take-Two Interactive Software, I made an exception.

That's because I assumed that EA might provide some new piece of information that would materially enhance details of the game maker's Sunday bid announcement.

My mistake.

In reality, the EA conference call, which lasted nearly an hour, was largely a rehashing of the information the company published in its Sunday press release, accentuated … Read more

In a startling bit of news, Electronic Arts announced Sunday morning that it has launched an uninvited bid to buy Grand Theft Auto video game franchise publisher Take-Two Interactive Software for $26 a share, or what could be a $2 billion deal.

And while EA, in its press release, did not make any reference to Vivendi's December agreement to purchase Activision, there can be no doubt that this is the response EA had to make to keep its spot as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the video games business.

The announcement comes on the heels of what appears to … Read more

Maybe there's something in the water but now we've got another hostile software battle under way. This time it's Electronic Arts bidding $2 billion in cash to acquire Take-Two Interactive. The sides are not exactly off to a smashing start with Take Two publicly telling Electronic Arts the offer simply ain't up to snuff.

To be continued.

(Update: Check out this piece for more context authored by my News.com colleague Daniel Terdiman.)

Here's the EA press release:

Electronic Arts Proposes to Acquire Take-Two Interactive Software for $26 Per Share in Cash, or Approximately $2.… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Dennis Fong is someone who has a lot of street cred in the world of video games. A former world champion in games like Quake and Doom, he's also the founder of XFire, a company that enabled easy instant messaging among gamers that he later sold to Viacom for oodles of money.

Now, he's got a new start-up, known as Raptr, and it seems to have some very influential people rather excited.

I got my first introduction to Raptr Friday at the Startup Showcase at the Game Developers Conference. The session, which was organized by Charles River Ventures' Susan Wu, put five entrepreneurs on the spot to give short presentations about their company. Wu and several industry experts then got the chance to weigh in on each presentation.

Essentially, Raptr is a social network for gamers, but one filled with useful applications--at least for those for whom hard-core gaming is a way of life.

But since there are millions and millions of people like that, the company has an instant and wide market.

… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--If you're a big Star Wars fan, you may find yourself salivating at the chance to play LucasArts' forthcoming game, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

That's because the game will place players inside the films' narrative, in particular in between Episode III and the original film, now known as Episode IV.

LucasArts released a trailer for the film Thursday, and in it, you can see the benefits of two new technologies that should change video games forever: Euphoria, a bio-feedback artificial intelligence system, and digital molecular matter, which provides more realistic physics and physical reactions.

Check out … Read more

We're almost reluctant to post this because it's been promised (and not delivered) for so long. But, with our luck, the Optimus Maximus OLED keyboard will come out on schedule, and we'll be lambasted for not having passed along the news.

"We begin shipping Optimus Maximus keyboards to those who ordered it last year," creator Art Lebedev announced today on its Optimus Project blog. To further show they mean business, according to Gizmodo, the first "Optimus Configurator" software is now available for download, for both the Mac and PC. All hail the most-hyped keyboard … Read more

DeviantArt gets 1.5 billion page views a month, making it one of the most popular Web sites that many people have never even heard of.

Despite the name, only a fraction of the art on the site is what might be labeled deviant. In reality, the site boasts millions of user-uploaded works of art, everything from photography to 3D digital conceptual art to old-fashioned canvas-and-paint portraits.

Think of it as a YouTube for artists trying to show their own work. Pieces can be viewed, commented on, even added to a user's own gallery of favorites. The range of … Read more

If ever there was a time for a famous futurist to be giving a keynote address at the Game Developers Conference, this is it.

When Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Singularity is Near and one of the most noted futurists around, takes the stage at GDC 2008 in San Francisco on Thursday to talk about "the next 20 years of gaming," he'll be weighing in at a moment in the industry's existence when the lines between games and Hollywood and advertising are blurring, when the term "gamer" encompasses 75-year-old grandmothers and when the … Read more