Working with Microsoft Was Very Frustrating for the Developers of Darwinia

Darwinia is one of those games that doesn't really fall into a genre. It's an RTS and a god-game, but it's also an action title, a puzzler and a cyber-hack game. Taking place in a gigantic network of surplus Protologic 68000 machines from the 1980s, Darwinia offers a world where the simple-poly Darwinians, possessing a rather simple, but promising and developing AI can evolve into something greater. The title was first released on the PC back in 2005, but Microsoft was so charmed by it, that it really wanted to bring it to he Xbox 360, by means of the Xbox Live Arcade.

But this didn't mean that Microsoft believed Darwinia was good enough for its console. As such, Darwinia+ was conceived, and bringing the game over to the XBLA proved to be a tormenting experience for its developer, Introversion. "We were incredibly frustrated. Everything we did they basically said was not good enough," Mark Morris, Introversion's MD, said in a recent interview with CVG.

"We hadn't realised how important the outer game experience was to Microsoft," he said. "We sort of thought the only thing that mattered was the game itself but Microsoft had a different view. That wanted all of the 'charm and character' of Darwinia, as they described it, like the intro sequence, the boot loaders and all this other stuff we did on PC brought over to the 360 – but updated, HD-ed and 'sex-ified'." How exactly was Introversion supposed to "sex-ify" the simple polygonal design of Darwinia is something that only Microsoft could understand.

While the developing staff proved to be "quite happy" with the menus that they kept drawing, Microsoft could not be swayed away from reactions such as, "'This doesn't say HD proposition, this doesn't say Xbox 360, this doesn't say new, novel... this isn't good enough.'" "We must have gone back with four or five menu iterations – something as simple as that," Morris explained.

But childhood trauma builds character and only by overcoming adversity can one become stronger. The Darwinia+ experience has helped Introversion better understand itself, and even create the best version of Darwinia yet. "But at the same time Microsoft always backed up what they said with quite good evidence and facts – they were quite reliable," Morris said, adding that, this way, it created "the best version of Darwinia we have ever made – the director's cut."