Next-Gen spoke with Grand Theft Auto creator Dave Jones about his upcoming Xbox 360 game Crackdown, his adoration of Xbox Live, out-doing GTA and a new $31 million
investment that will let his firm make lots of cool stuff…
For a game designer that has created the Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings franchises, what else is there left to do?
Jones' answer: Snag a cool $31 million investment for your company and keep plugging away at two pieces of fresh IP.
Jones in fact is the person who created 1991's meandering Lemmings and the decidedly more mature GTA, which debuted in 1997.
Now he's the founder, CEO and creative director of Scotland-based Real Time Worlds, established in 2002. The next frontier for Jones and his crew is online-focused next-gen games development, initially in the form of its first title, the Microsoft-published Crackdown for the Xbox 360, and then Webzen's All Points Bulletin (APB) for PC and Xbox 360.
Nearly three years into development, Crackdown almost seems like the anti-GTA: It's still a go-anywhere-do-anything sandbox-style game, but in Crackdown the main character is not the criminal sort. Instead, the game puts gamers on the other side of the law, playing the role of a super-powerful cop that has been commissioned to rid the fictional Pacific City of crime. Don't be mistaken-the protagonist is an authority figure, but as justice's last resort, he can cleanse the town by whatever means necessary, so gamers shouldn't expect to be giving thugs a fair trial.
Jones told Next-Gen that the game, due out next year, is shaping up nicely. "[Crackdown] is coming along really well," he said. "Basically, we're in the final, final stages of just bug-fixing now. We hope to have that all wrapped up over the holidays, and then launch in spring. It's not far away at all, as far as we're concerned."
Darren writes: "Despite much moaning and groaning, Xbox has had some smashing console exclusive games during its four generation lifespan. Crackdown was one such game, released in the early years of the Xbox 360"
Still one of my all time favorite games. It hurt to see what happened to Crackdown 3 😔
Gamerheadquarters; "With the jump in power from the Xbox Series X all Xbox 360 and Original Xbox titles that are backwards compatible should be enhanced as soon as they’re available."
They’ve been working the past few years and have become proficient in that department so I definitely think they are capable of such a feat. Their BC through emulation that can natively upscale blows my mind and gives them an advantage over competitors using multiple hardware settings which requires higher clock speeds and produces more heat.
I caught Chaos Theory on sale and was actually blown away by how it scaled on the One X.
I imagine that they'll carry over the functionality of the X regarding playing previous gen games to the series X.
They better have good support for backwards compatibly.... Since they have no 1st pay games LMAO 😂
“compatibly”, “1st pat games”: Are those supposed to be “compatibility” and “first party games”? Doesn’t really come across as an adult. No disrespect, legit question: is English not your first language?
And xbox one games, there are many underperformed 3rd party games that needs frames boost.
Crackdown is a series of sandbox-style action adventure video games published by Xbox Game Studios. Retro Respawn looks at the first title.
