#Quantum redshift xbox series#

It had 16 different characters who could be picked from a Street Fighter style character select screen (“The original WipEout had characters - everyone forgets that because the ships were the stars. The idea of the game was that it would be a racing beat 'em up. The independent developer staffed up to nine and set to work. Microsoft gave Curly Monsters one million dollars - a minuscule amount by today's standards - to make Neon the WipEout beater it hoped it could be. “WipEout was still seen as Sony's poster boy in that regard and they'd done Fusion on the PS2,” Thompson recalls.

#Quantum redshift xbox series#

But it needed a sci-fi racer to take on PlayStation's influential WipEout series which had, over the course of the PlayStation's life, made gaming cool. Realistic racer (Project Gotham Racing), check. Microsoft, about to launch the Xbox in 2001, bit.Īt the time Microsoft was putting together its launch line-up and wanted a portfolio of games for its console that covered all the bases: science fiction shooter (Halo: Combat Evolved), check. Having put together a design document packed with rendered shots of what the small team thought Neon would end up looking like, Thompson and co pitched the game to publishers. “We were the guys who had done WipEout so we thought, let's play on that.” “We thought the best way to go on was to maximise the WipEout connection,” Thompson, now director of art and animation at BioWare, tells Eurogamer at the Bradford Animation Festival. After it was finished, Curly set about creating its next game, a futuristic racer called Neon. They were Martin Linklater, Lee Carus, Neil Thompson, Chris Roberts, Nick Burcombe and Andrew Satterthwaite.Ĭurly Monsters' first game was the well-received N-Gen Racing for the PlayStation One, published by Infogrames in 2000. Quantum Redshift was created by a developer called Curly Monsters, a Merseyside studio founded in 1998 by six developers who had left Psygnosis having made WipEout. This month marks the 10 year anniversary of Xbox Live, Microsoft's ground-breaking online console gaming service - but that's not the only Xbox exclusive that turned 10 in 2012.ĭo you remember Quantum Redshift, the racing game that launched in September 2002 for Microsoft's fledgling entry into the console game market? It was a futuristic racer Microsoft hoped would take on Sony's successful WipEout series at its own game and complete the Xbox's portfolio of genres that already included a sci-fi shooter and a realistic racer.īut Quantum Redshift failed, its developer closed and Microsoft walked out on a contract that guaranteed a sequel after spending one million dollars to put the brakes on WipEout.