In part 1 of a three part article about the 2008 year, Chris, a member of the Introversion staff, the company which developed Darwinia and was involved in both DEFCON and Subversion, described the horrible year they had in 2008, after thinking that they were going to be able to improve over the horrible year they had in 2007.

Unfortunately for them, they were wrong, with a series of problems weighing down on them, including the needs of Microsoft, who managed to anger the staff of the much smaller company.

The first major problem was Microsoft. I want to be clear that in hindsight, we believe Microsoft were absolutely correct in the calls they made, and we were wrong. But at the time, oh my god they were pissing us off. We’d done a massive treatment of the in-game menus for Darwinia and Multiwinia, and the end result is exactly what you see in the PC/Mac versions of Multiwinia now. We were very happy with that and considered the game ready to go through their certification process, but Microsoft did not agree. They requested we go into an extensive period of redesign and polish on the game, covering everything from the menus to the squaddie control method in Darwinia, to the game modes in Multiwinia. It was the first time a massive company had effectively told Introversion what to do, and we didn’t like that at all. It was also months of work, and the concept of open-ended polish and iteration with a company several orders of magnitude larger than our own didn’t hugely appeal. We finally resolved this situation in the only way we could – we separated the PC and Xbox versions of the game, pushed ahead with a PC only version of Multiwinia, and put the Xbox project on a back burner.

It's pretty obvious in Hindsight that Microsoft had the right idea all along for Darwinia+, and we were too absorbed with Multiwinia to see that. We wanted the focus to be the new game Multiwinia, they wanted the IGF winning game Darwinia.

Mishtram via forums.introversion.co.uk »