“At this point Sega were refusing to admit to us they were going multi-platform,” says Martyn Chudley, founder of Bizarre Creations, and the company’s managing director until its closure in 2011. But by the autumn of 2000, it was increasingly clear that Sega was on the wane as a hardware manufacturer – despite the company’s protestations to the contrary. Since 1997, the Liverpool-based racing-game studio had been working on Metropolis Street Racer for the Dreamcast. While Oddworld Inhabitants was struggling with Sony, Bizarre Creations had its own problems with Sega. “The attitude was kind of, ‘You’ll figure it out’.”Īn early version of the Xbox’s design, shown in Tokyo in March 2000. What’s more, Sony’s response to the developer’s tribulations was dismissive. But the expense of that was that no one knew how to use it,” Lanning explains. “The PS2 got supercomputing capability into an affordable consumer electronic box. Threatened with budget cuts by publisher GT Interactive, the studio’s engineers were also finding the PlayStation 2 extremely difficult to program on. But the studio was slowly sliding towards crisis. In the summer of 2000, Lanning was overseeing development of Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee – the third game in the lauded Oddworld series – for PC and PlayStation 2. There’s a certain truth to that,” says Lorne Lanning. “People used to say that Microsoft was stealing the exclusives.
The Xbox was easier to make games for than Sony’s or Nintendo’s consoles, and Microsoft went to previously unheard-of lengths to ensure that the Xbox’s launch titles were as strong as they could be. It was the relationship between it, and the developers who made its games. What separated the Xbox from other consoles of the time was not the power of its hardware or the appeal of its infamously chunky, almost brutalist design. Microsoft shoved both aside to eventually become Sony’s direct rival, and the battle for the space beneath your TV continues to this day.
Before 2001, Sega and Nintendo were the main competitors to Sony’s ascendant PlayStation. T wenty years since the launch of the original Xbox, its manufacturer Microsoft remains the new kid on the block: no new competitor has entered the home games console field since.
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