John Needham Leaves Cryptic to be Gazillion's CEO

On Wednesday, Cryptic Studios and Atari announced that Jack Emmert has been appointed CEO of Cryptic Studios following the departure of former CEO John Needham. This morning, Gazillion Entertainment announced that Needham has been named CEO of the company.

Prior to joining Cryptic in 2008, Needham was the senior vice president of business development and operations at Sony Online Entertainment. He is now "extremely excited to be a part of Gazillion."

“Like the team here, I believe that in the near future, rich console-quality games will be delivered through the browser," he said. "With great creative talent like [Gazillion President and COO] David Brevik and massive brands like Marvel, we’re going to create browser-centric, free-to-play games that set a new standard for quality and deliver a deep, compelling experience.”

In similar news, Gazillion founder Rob Hutter is now chairman of the company.

Gazillion's Fortune Online is Coming to Browsers

Last week, Jumpgate Evolution Community Manager Kara "OhSnap" Kroupa announced that she was moving to a new community manager role at NetDevil to work on an "exciting new project." She hinted at the time that more details would be coming soon, and she wasn't kidding.

Gazillion Entertainment and NetDevil announced this week that Fortune Online, their new browser-based action MMO, has entered closed beta. According to the team, the free-to-play dungeon-crawling game will be available through "any browser released this century."

Head over to the game's official site to sign up for the beta. If you'd like to see Fortune Online in action, check out some new screenshots in our gallery and the launch trailer after the jump. We've also added some quotes from the team below the video.