There are many “thoughts” going around right now about Microsoft and its Xbox brand. After all, last week was easily one of the most devastating weeks in Xbox history via the shutdown of some of their best or most fan-beloved studios, followed by how the company tried to “explain” why they did it, only to make things worse. In short, fans are questioning what the higher-ups in both Xbox and Microsoft are doing and decided to “rewind the clock” to see if they had made this kind of mistake before. As it would turn out, Grand Theft Auto would be the answer to their questions.
Confused? It all has to do with a clip from a documentary that was posted on Twitter. In it, we see a couple of people talking about how when Xbox was trying to break into the industry, a small team at the time came to them and noted that they were going to take one of their 2D franchises and bring it into the 3D space, thinking it would be huge. They showed it to the “newly-important Xbox executives,” and they didn’t understand what was being shown to them. They noted that they didn’t have faith in the dev team, that the game likely “wasn’t going to transition that well,” and so on.
As one of the people noted, they were surprised that Xbox passed on the title. Then, the other person noted that this title was Grand Theft Auto III. If you don’t know, that title is the one that took the franchise to unbelievable heights. One of the people in the video, Kevin Brachus, revealed that in 2001, the game sold over 14 million units, and then Rockstar was able to crank out a sequel a year later, and then IT was the best-selling game of 2002! So Rockstar made a bunch of money and established itself as one of the best developers around, and Xbox didn’t get a chunk of any of that. Sure, they’d eventually get the games on Xbox, but they had a chance to elevate themselves in a big way and failed.
The irony of this, as the comments of the tweet note, is that this is hardly the only time that Xbox has pulled a whiff on what would soon be a huge title. One of the biggest ones from recent times is Baldur’s Gate 3. They had the chance to try making it a big title for the Xbox Game Pass but didn’t see the potential. The game would sell millions and become the Game of the Year winner for 2023.
