This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.
When I worked at Official Xbox Magazine, the first thing you came upon when you entered our area of the office was our demo station. There sat a small couch and our biggest TV, a behemoth 36-inch CRT that could display at 480p – meaning, the same resolution as every other console game, but without the interlacing, thus creating a crisper image. Because when developers came through to show us their in-progress games, we wanted them to look their best. I was never more grateful for that gigantic 480p TV than when a then-unknown (at least to me) Swedish developer named Starbreeze came by to show off the licensed game they were working on: The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay.
“Whatever,” I thought. “It’ll just be a cheap movie cash-in.” And then I actually saw it and my jaw hit the floor.
Funny enough, the first thing that made my eyes go wide wasn’t even the game itself – though that would happen in a few more moments. No, I and the rest of the OXM team were transfixed by Riddick’s front-end menu screen . See, it was a normal-mapped 3D cube whose letters erupted from and receded into the shiny, beautifully textured cube when you moved from one selection to the next.
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