In a recent interview with Kiwi TalkzFormer Microsoft executive producer Garrett Young has revealed that the company already canceled a potential soccer game in development ahead of the Xbox’s launch as a condition for EA to release its sports game on the console.
The topic came up about 26 minutes into the roughly 50-minute interview (which is worth watching in its entirety) after host Reece “Kiwi Talkz” Reilly pointed out the incredible number of genres that Young has managed to work with over the course of his career and asked how he was able to pivot accordingly.
Young initially started to answer the question, talking about his origins in developing a bunch of little-known sports games for PC, but quickly got sidetracked after bringing up a soccer project he had been working on. worked at the company for the original Xbox.
For a brief moment it looked like he was going to drop the subject and return to the subject for fear of saying too much, but luckily he changed his mind, telling Reilly, “This may be confidential but I will share it with you. anyway”. He then recounted how Microsoft believed the death of the Dreamcast had something to do with the lack of EA games on the console and that company executives at the time were reluctant to repeat the same error, so easily accepted. to EA’s request to put the project up for sale as part of its agreement.
You can find a lightly edited version of the transcript below:
“I was working on a football game at the time…and one day came Robbie Bach, who ended up being one of the four presidents of Microsoft or whatever. Good guy! He said to me: ‘Hey guys, we need EA to support the Xbox. EA didn’t support the Sega Dreamcast.'” EA hadn’t supported the Dreamcast; Dreamcast is dead – some might say because the controller was really clunky. Fair. It actually worked well for racing games. But others would say it was because there was no FIFA, or Madden. FIFA for international reasons. Madden for American reasons.
“They didn’t have any of the EA games because EA said, ‘Sega, we’ll support your platform; no problem! But you just have to give us this money. You don’t have to charge us.’ for cassettes, cartridges, discs, whatever. All these things EA demanded. They said, “Your platform is going to die if we’re not there.” » That’s what EA said, right? I wasn’t at the meeting, but that’s what I was told, and Sega said, “Whatever, no, we’ll do it. We have these games. We’re competing.” with you in these other areas. Everything will be fine without you. We’ve been fine without you before. Never mind. Sega is awesome. Woo-hoo!’ And I agree, Sega is great, but unfortunately it didn’t turn out the way they hoped and they ended up killing off the Dreamcast a few years later.
“Microsoft, and any intelligent executive, will say, ‘Let’s not kill our console before it comes out.’ I mean, the Dreamcast was canceled about four months before the Xbox came out. We had already done a lot of PR. We didn’t want to follow the death of the Dreamcast and now we’re launching a console six months/three months / whatever after Sega announced the end of theirs. So out of that infinite wisdom and the infinite wisdom of all the executives, they said, “Let’s make a deal with EA” and one of EA’s requirements was (…) no football game from Microsoft “No football match in the first part. So it was canceled. “
Unfortunately, Young doesn’t give many details about the name of the project, but he did give us a little hint. In the same interview, he mentioned elsewhere that it would be a PC port of a pre-existing Microsoft soccer game, which seems to imply that the project would be an Xbox version of Rage Games. Microsoft International Football 2000.
Microsoft International Soccer 2000 was a sports game released two years before the Xbox’s initial release for PC and received mostly positive reviews from publications of the time. Actually, IGN’s Uro Jojic thought she could potentially become a contender for the FIFA crown, writing in February 2000:
“MS International Soccer 2000 is definitely worth a try – in a good way. If you’re a fan of the game trying to break free from EA’s grip on soccer titles, Rage Software’s little baby might just be the right way to go. It’s still suffering from some growing pains, but with good feedback from the gaming community, a little more funding, and a little more time, the MS International Soccer series could very well turn out. prove to be the first real competition for the power of EA FIFA.”.
Looking back, it’s pretty sad that we didn’t get to see the series mature and make the jump to Microsoft’s first console (part of us wondering what that timeline looks like), but it arguably has been more beneficial in the long term. for Microsoft to work with EA rather than trying to compete directly with them.
