He looked like a new man. An excited and re-energized David Bowman and I met on the floor of E3 to talk about Horizons, the game’s growth and upcoming expansion tentatively titled “Horizons: The Settlements”.

Since the new year, Bowman says that Tulga and Horizons have undergone a renaissance.

“We now have greater confidence in the future of the company,” he said before rattling off statistics. In January, the game retained between 1 and 3% of those players who downloaded the trial. Soon, that number was 19%. This month? 54% of people who downloaded the trial subscribed to the game.

We spoke with Jason Murdick, a key player in the just-announced “Settlements” expansion for Tulga’s Horizons: Empire of Istaria. Murdick, a Lead Content Designer at Tulga Games, began working on Horizons four months before the game went live in 2003 (interestingly, in an industry rife with turnover, Tulga’s 20-man team is composed primarily of folks from the original team). Murdick has been involved with “Settlements” from the start, and was significant in creating the expansion’s feature list (that is, new housing for dryads, dwarves, and possibly other races, decorations and furniture). While not very involved with Tulga’s other newly announced project – horror-themed MMO Dark World Online -- he promises we’ll see big things in the near future.