Dec. 14, 2007, Real E$tate Empire is now on Download Free Games. No, the game is not free although you can download the free demo on their site!
Nov. 24, 2007, The Font Fiend beta demo has been released! Click the link below for more information, to see sample images and to download the demo version of our new web and game utility for creating great font art.
Nov. 19, 2007, A neat bit of news, we are in the latest Staples flyer! Maybe not a big deal for EA but for an indie. developer it's exciting! Real E$tate Empire for that House Flip fan on your Christmas list?
Real E$tate Empire at Staples! 
Nov. 4, 2007, Ooops! A recent update to the websites formatting code left the Real E$tate Empire town editing manual completely unreadable. Our apologies to all affected, the manual has been fixed and is once again available at the link below.
Real E$tate Empire town editing instructions
Oct. 6, 2007, A preview image from our upcoming game and web image dev. tool, Font Fiend is now available! Stay tuned for more news soon!
Aug. 29, 2007, Real E$tate Empire has been picked up for world wide retail distribution by Merscom and their distribution partners! Check out the logo they made for the North American box by following the link below:
Aug. 8, 2007, The stories have been read, the votes have been cast and Editor Jennifer agrees... The Stone Priest's Wife has taken our Pump Up The Purse contest and the cash prize of $220! Congratulations to Dan Head for winning the contest with his lively tale of swords and sorcery. Our sincere thanks to everyone who participated and to all of the readers who took time to leave comments.
Aug. 5, 2007, Due to scheduling issues, the Pump Up The Purse contest winner will now be announced on Wed. Aug. 8, 2007 - our apologies to the remaining contestants.
Pump Up The Purse final round!
July 27, 2007, Terragame have recently picked up Real E$tate Empire and added it to their impressive line up, check out their site by following the link below.
July 24, 2007, The Pump Up The Purse contest is now down to the last two contestant stories, Seperation Anxiety and The Stone Priests Wife. Please vote for your favorite story, the final prize of $220 will be awarded on Monday, August 6, 2007!
Pump Up The Purse final round!
July 23, 2007, Our new site upgrade resulted in a few glitches that a few of you have been kind enough to email in about. Much appreciated as always! Those issues will be resolved shortly and then there will be an announcement about the writing contest!
July 9, 2007, And then there were three! Who have the readers and Editor Jennifer given the nod and placed that much closer to becoming our overall winner? Who fell out of the contest? Click below to find out, read the latest installments and cast your vote for who should advance to the finals of the Pump Up The Purse contest!
July 4, 2007, Last week we ran a contest that rewarded our favorite Pump Up The Purse contest comment of the week a free Rusty Axe Game. Dan Head, author of The Stone Priest's Wife won with his entry and has picked a free copy of Battle Castles for his PC.
June 24, 2007, The readers have spoken and Editor Jennifer concurs... find out who advanced to round two of the elimination round of the Pump Up The Purse writing contest and read the second installment of all the stories that advanced!
June 21, 2007, Red Marble Games have been working hard on the Macintosh version of Real E$tate Empire and have begun their beta testing! Stay tuned for a release date for Real E$tate Empire for the Mac!
June 18, 2007, Polling booths are now open! Check out your chance to help guide Judge Jennifer in the voting process for Pump Up The Purse elimination round stories! Also, to reward all of the readers who have been taking the time to place comments about the stories, we will be giving away a free copy of either Battle Castles or Real E$tate Empire to the author of our favorite comment this week!
June 13, 2007, Recently a couple of events have caused us to need a simple HTML scrubbing tool. Uni2HTML is a windows program borne out of the desire to answer those needs. Uni2HTML will translate a unicode file into browser friendly ASCII including translating those files containing character codes from languages such as Cyrillic into English. Uni2HTML can also read a normal text file and will scrub out the special characters that Word can create that browsers don't have an answer for so they simply display a question mark. These include the tilted apostrophe, the curled quotation marks, the long dash and the triple period character. Uni2HTML will take all of those characters and translate them into their logical equivalents so that a browser displays them correctly.
June 13, 2007, The Pump Up The Purse contest has now entered the elimination round! Our five finalists are:
The Stone Priests Wife
by Dan Head
1st round combined score: 16/20
Seperation Anxiety
by Craig McLean Alexander
1st round combined score: 14/20
Myopic
by Gary Starta
1st round combined score: 13/20
Habitat-56a
by Thorbjorn Steen
1st round combined score: 13/20
Reality Check
by Chris Blizzard
1st round combined score: 12.5/20
The first quarter of each story has now been posted in our elimination round section. Reader polling will begin on Monday. Those who take part are urged to use their powers for good.
June 11, 2007, Long time followers of Rusty Axe will notice a brand new heading in our main menu bar! In the coming months we will be fleshing out a web and game dev. section including, drum roll please... the Rusty Axe hardware abstraction library. This API has been used in every Rusty Axe game ever released and will be followed by a series of articles detailing how to use the library along with the PC source code for all functions. The price for all of this? Free for commercial and personal usage! Additionally we will be releasing some simple tools - some free and some commercial including something we are very excited about, a font and web/game graphic development tool called Font Fiend! Stay tuned folks!
June 5, 2007, Week five stories, The Strange Destiny and Seperation Anxiety have been judged and posted, thus concluding the first round of judging. Stay tuned for the elimination round contestants information!
May 28, 2007, Week four stories, The Stone Priest's Wife and Triune: Blood Relic, have been judged. Jennifer takes off the kid gloves when she discovers that one of the stories isn't up to snuff!
May 24, 2007, Week three stories, Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On and Reality Check, have been judged. See what Editor Jennifer thinks of this weeks entries!
May 16, 2007, We have added a new featured artist to the Rusty Vault section of the site. Check out Von Caberte's work by clicking the link below!
May 16, 2007, Two new stories, Myopic and Canton, have been judged. Click the link below to see the scores and to read the reviewers notes!
May 11, 2007, OK, apparently yet another story got caught in our very efficient spam system so we are also allowing Seperation Anxiety by Craig Mclean Alexander into the contest. But, no kidding folks, the contest is really closed this time! Check out all of the entries and the first weeks ratings by clicking the link below.
May 10, 2007, This weeks stories, Habitat 56-a and Primes: Bad Blood, have been judged. Check out the scores and what the judge had to say!
May 8, 2007, One more story has crept in after the wire due to our spam system delaying its' original entry. Jeremy Lynn's contemporary novella, Canton, rounds out our field and brings the total purse to $218. Stay tuned, the first two story rankings will be posted shortly!
May 1, 2007, The story submission phase for Pump Up the Purse! has now closed. We have eight great stories to share with you and beginning next week we will start the first round of judging with two stories per week being ranked. Once all eight submissions have been ranked the top four will advance to the finals where the weekly elimination round will begin!
April 30, 2007, Version 1.81 of Real E$tate Empire has been uploaded. In the 1.8 release of last week a minor installer bug was introduced that caused some players to not be able to load the games data file. Customers who purchased the game in the last few days and who were affected by this problem will be given a free copy of Battle Castles PC.
Real E$tate Empire demo download
April 27, 2007, Ooops! A broken link to the town editing data pack for Real E$tate Empire has been fixed. Thanks to Bill Folsom over at Manifesto Games for spotting that one (and actually having the savvy to point out the correct URL!). Thanks Bill!
April 26, 2007, A new version of Real E$tate Empire, version 1.8, has just been released. A bug that caused random crashes for about 2% of our users has been fixed and a lot of tuning, tweaking and refining has been accomplished. Users who have purchased an earlier version should email reeUpgrade@RustyAxe.com with their BMTMicro purchase information and they will be given instructions on how to receive a free upgrade!
Real E$tate Empire demo download
April 23, 2007, Internet high scores for Real E$tate Empire 1.6 have been disabled in anticipation of a big update due later this week. The old high score table has been immortalized, never to be touched again! Congrats if you made it to that high score board, your great score won't ever be erased!
Real E$tate Empire high scores
April 16, 2007, With two weeks to go we are still accepting story submissions for Pump up the Purse. Hurry and get your novella size entries in and stake your claim to the cash because in two weeks... the judging will begin!
April 13, 2007, Friday the 13th finds us hiding out from bad luck and... launching Little Shop of Treasures in our online store!
March 29, 2007, Real E$tate Empire town building is now available to demo users as well as purchasers of the full version of the game! Let's see the great towns that all of our users can create!
March 21, 2007, PTD Magazine will be publishing the Real E$tate Empire demo on the front of their next magazine, due out... tomorrow!
March 20, 2007, Initial story entries have been posted in the Pump Up The Purse section - be sure to get your stories in by April 30! In related news, Ginny Weinhardt has given us a nice mention in her fiction writing blog at about.com which you can check out by clicking the link below.
March 19, 2007, We've added some great new games to the site including Peggle and Westward! Also, stay tuned for an update later this week about our writing contest, including a list of our initial contestants.
Feb. 28, 2007, A minor bug in the online manual for Real E$tate Empire has been reported and fixed. Rusty Axe Games would like to thank everyone who has helped make Real E$tate Empire our most successful game launch to date and also to ask for your help! If anyone playing either the full game or the demo has found a bug then here is the place to report it. Please include particulars about what version you were playing (shown when the program starts), what OS and any other software running on your machine at the same time.
Report Real E$tate Empire bugs!
Feb. 22, 2007, And now for something completely different... We are holding a cash prize based writing contest called Pump up the Purse! It's free to enter and you can find more details by clicking the link below.
Feb. 22, 2007, Rusty Axe Game is proud to announce that we will be working with Red Marble Games to bring Real E$tate Empire to the Macintosh! Release date and further details will be released in the coming weeks.
Feb. 8, 2007, Casual Review have posted the first available game review of Real E$tate Empire. A little poetic license was taken in the description of the game but all in all they "got it" and proclaimed that we have the best house buying simulation game available. We're all blushing and stuff.
Is it going to be the smash breakout casual game of the season? Nope. But it was never meant to be. Is it the most compelling casual house trading
simulation game out there? Absolutely.
Read review
Feb. 5, 2007, Real E$tate Empire is now available for purchase!
Feb. 1, 2007, Episode 3 of Awesome Storm Justice has been posted!
