Q&A: PHILIP OLIVER & ANDREW OLIVER
The men in charge of Blitz Games look back at the creation of the first published Xbox game
How did you get the job of producing Fuzion Frenzy for microsoft?
PHILIP: When Microsoft decided to enter the console market they sensibly decided to contact many major developers around the world. Blitz Games was growing fast and gaining a great reputation for mass market, fun character-based games. They wanted to launch with a variety of first-party games that appealed to different player types and one of the slots they were trying to fill was a party game. This fitted our profile well and we were invited to pitch.
What were the advantages and disadvantages of the Xbox hardware compared to the competition?
ANDREW: It really was a standardised PC in box. This meant it was extremely familiar and easy to develop for, especially for any developers that came from PC development. In fact, Microsoft told developers to just get on and write the games, ASAP, with high spec PCS and console-style controllers.
How long did development of Fuzion Frenzy take?
PHILIP: We learnt Microsoft was planning a console in summer 2000 and pitched Blitz Party in the Autumn. November and December saw us getting the team together and getting the project underway. To win the contract, not only did it need to be a great compelling game, we had to agree to have the game mastered by the end of August 2001. Microsoft assured us things would move fast from their side and so we immediately put developers on making minigames, as we only had ten months of development time.
How did you come up with the minigames found in Fuzion Frenzy?
ANDREW: We had a team of about 35 people on the game and split them into three subteams. Within these subteams we paired artists with programmers and each had to create a prototype game a week for the first two months. Then, working with our Microsoft Producer, Gordon Hee, we picked the ones that were working best and dropped those that looked problematic or just weren’t fun. The next phase was to work up the chosen prototypes to more polished games, with depth, AI and fitting the chosen art style. It was massive parallel development and it worked really well and resulted in 45 minigames and the metagame. Fuzion Frenzy was completed on schedule and was the first mastered game for Xbox, in fact it appeared on shop shelves a week ahead of the Xbox itself!
What audience was the setting and cast of Fuzion Frenzy designed to appeal to?
PHILIP: We wanted to ensure there was a consistent style running through all the games, even though they were all very different in gameplay. So, whilst designers and programmers were prototyping fun minigames, the art team were working on characters and art styles that would bind everything together coherently. They took inspiration from the skaters and boarders scene and then we decided to give it a strong futuristic sport arena look, taking inspiration from films like Blade Runner and The Running Man. We worked with JD Alley, the Microsoft Art Consultant to finalise the style.
How did you feel about Fuzion Frenzy’s sales and critical reception?
ANDREW: I think the reception and sales, around half a million copies for the opening selling quarter, were all pretty reasonable and justified. Obviously, we’d hoped for more, but the small install base, and cost of additional controllers limited its potential. The development team continued development with Fuzion Frenzy 2 with online play, as we knew that in the new year Microsoft would be launching the Live service and Fuzion Frenzy would make an obvious launch title for the service. Sadly, slow sales on the original boxed version meant they halted development of this version.
Later, sales continued to rise and over a million copies were sold. We were in constant contact with our producer and we convinced them it was worth making a sequel. However, due to internal politics at Microsoft, whilst they agreed to a sequel, they put the game out to tender and we had to bid competitively to win the rights to develop it. Hudson Soft was chosen as the developer of the sequel and they used a lot of our concepts.
We are extremely proud of Fuzion Frenzy and the team that built it. Those ten months were a pretty intensive time for all involved, but it was fun to develop and we so pleased that so many people found it fun to play and still fondly remember it.