NEWS - Thursday, April 29, 2004
Xbox-Exclusive Games a Growing Trend
In an inconspicuous Texas office building, doom is being sealed pixel by pixel, polygon by polygon. More precisely, Doom 3, the long-awaited sequel in the enormously successful Doom video game series, is taking shape in the studios of Id Software. Early glimpses reveal a hellish vision that might have kept Hieronymous Bosch up nights: gut-sucking demons, skeletal spiders topped with inverted human skulls and other assorted grotesqueries skittering and scampering along dark hallways. And Id has not yet settled on a release date for Doom 3 (sometime this year, they say), one thing is clear: the game has been designed to be played on only one console, Microsoft's Xbox. "Exclusivity has nothing to do with any decision to go with Microsoft for what we could get out of it," said Todd Hollenshead, Id's chief executive. "It was a technology motivation entirely." Faced with years of game development costing millions of dollars, Id concluded that Microsoft's big black console had critical technology that its rivals - Sony's PlayStation 2, by far the industry leader, and Nintendo's GameCube - did not.Source: http://www.nytimes.com/
