Alienware has had its fair share of time in the limelight. The company emerged on the outskirts of Miami a few years ago and offered power hungry PC users an alternative to Falcon Northwest's gaming systems. Earlier this year, through dealings with Metabyte, Alienware became the sole proprietor of Wicked3D's PGC technology, and there's no doubt the company will continue to enjoy its notoriety with gamers when it ships said PGC technology - in the form of a pair of Voodoo3 2000s - later this month.

　　Alienware's growth continued this morning with the unveiling of its spin-off technology company: Alienware Technology. The company was created for the development of software tools and utilities designed to better the gaming experience. The first such utility is a voice-over-IP solution similar to Roger Wilco called First Contact.

　　In a nutshell, First Contact allows players to talk to each other while playing their favorite multiplayer games over a TCP/IP connection with no additional hardware or dedicated servers. First Contact works on a peer-to-peer configuration over an Internet connection as low as 28.8kbps. Of course, the software can also be installed on a dedicated server for improved client-server performance, but Alienware affirms that either configuration utilizes minimal bandwidth and won't interfere with latency or ping times. During development, First Contact has used up all of 1kbps of bandwidth on a 6-player, voice enabled game of Quake II.

　　Currently, First Contact is supported by Mechwarrior 3, Quake II, Quake III: Arena, Team Fortress Classic and a number of other undisclosed titles. Development of First Contact is currently entering the beta stages, and a final product could be available as a 1.5MB download as early as the end of this month. Alienware hasn't decided on a price yet, although company president Nelson Gonzalez told GameSpot News that it might be a nice round number: US$0.00 - although he made no firm promises.

　　What does the future hold for Alienware Technology? Gonzalez alluded to the fact that an SDK of First Contact will be licensed to game developers for third party development. He also hinted that the technology might become a native feature of DirectX 8.0. For the immediate future, the company is currently developing a multiplayer game browser similar to Gamespy, which, among other features, will offer voice capability.