During this time, Steve Murch, a then-employee of Microsoft, convinced Bill Gates to acquire a small online game site (then owned by Electric Gravity). Between 1996–97, Murch worked on modernizing the site and adding—and sometimes remaking—new games. Joshua Howard, also an employee at Microsoft in what would later be the MSN Gaming Zone department, petitioned Microsoft to make the movement of Ants onto their servers a priority, and eventually "Microsoft Ants" became one of the original games to be tested and officially inducted (though slightly manipulated) into the newly remade Internet Gaming Zone. This was done primarily as a result of its user-friendly interface and its cute characters, who both spoke to and interacted with each other at the whim of the user.