XBLA Week: (finally concludes) Interview – Outrun Online Arcade

XBLA Week has been going on for. Erm. About a month now. But yeah. Here's the final interview: Outrun Online Arcade.

First, could you just introduce yourself and explain your role on Outrun

Pat Phelan, Exec Producer.

Why choose XBLA as a platform to distribute Outrun?

Xbox LIVE Arcade seemed the natural place for an old arcade classic such as OutRun. The Arcade cabinets are still very popular throughout the world and we wanted to bring that success onto people’s home consoles. Also we think a lot of people may have missed the OutRun series first time round so giving them the opportunity to experience the beautiful blue skies, speed and fun of this classic game at a reasonable price was something we really wanted to do. XBLA has a great online community and bringing in the function to have 6 player games on LIVE should present some interesting Leaderboard scores and competition around the world.

What was the biggest challenge developing for XBLA?

Other than working with legacy code, we didn’t really have any major issues bringing Outrun to XBLA. Our tools made stripping out the old front end and replacing it with a funky new one a total breeze. Updating the graphics and improving resolution was fairly straight forward. Adding Live functionality was relatively painless.

Did you have any problems with keeping Outrun's filesize down?

We had to limit the number of music tracks and we had to compress some of the VO’s a tad to keep under the download size. Although we would loved to have included every track, every car and every bit of music, we had to make some decisions to get the game within the D/L footprint. On balance I think we’ve drawn together all the features the fans would expect from Outrun. Old and new fans will not be disappointed with the features set we settled on for XBLA.

Can you see Sumo doing more XBLA games in the future?

We’re pretty diverse when it comes to platform support here and we’ll always do what we think is right for a particular medium but I’m more than sure that as a group we’ll continue to support XBLA.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.