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Total estimated sales of all Pickford Bros' games: 6,451,068 |
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Number of games in all territories the Pickford Bros have been involved in:
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Average estimated sales per released game: 41,090 |
Other Zee-3 zones:
MCV / CTW - PS2 launch
Articles from the UK video game trade press about Zed Two becoming one of the first PlayStation 2 developers in Europe.
This was a real big deal for us at the time. Along with Rage (now departed), Zed Two (gone too!) managed to become one of the only developers in Europe working on the pre-launch PlayStation 2, thanks to our Japanese publisher. This was at the time when Sony were making all that fuss about the PS2 being military level technology, and it couldn't be exported outside of Japan without a munitions permit, or some such nonsense.
We wanted to make a bigger story about this coup than we actually did, but it was all a little bit naughty as we were only officially supposed to work on devkits supplied by Sony Europe (who didn't have any themselves at the time), and by sending a dev team to work on the hardware in Japan we were kind of sneaking around Sony's rules. All we wanted to do was make a good game and some money, but console developers live in fear of inucurring the wrath of the manufacturers, who can withdraw your developers license any time they like, taking away your ability to work.
We had a scary meeting when we finally came to ask for concept approval from Sony Europe for AquaAqua, where instead of producing the usual concept document we gave them a master disk of the finished game, before we'd applied for PS2 developer status (which you couldn't get until you had a concept approved), and therefore before we should have had a sniff of a dev kit or manual. Thankfully they needed launch products, but our life was on the line that day!
Its funny looking back how many platform firsts we've been involved with, in Europe at least. We worked on the first SNES devkit outside of Japan when developing Equinox, which was ironically supplied, against all the rules, but our publisher Sony. We even gave some Nintendo of America visitors their first glimps of the SNES in action on a visit to Software Creations Manchester offices, as they didn't have one in the US at that time. Prior to that we started development of the first Gameboy game in Europe through Rare, before the machine was launched (although the actual game was eventually canned). But we didn't have a big hit with any of these early titles, so maybe we should wait around in future (not that I expect anyone will let us near their pre-launch hardware these days)...
Pages © 2002 Intent Media.
Ste Pickford
17th August 2004
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