Portal Was Nearly An XBLA Title
Author: Rees | Date: April 28, 2008
We here at TTB all love us a bit of Portal, but to be entirely honest, we’d have bought The Orange Box without it anyway. So it seems a litte odd that this quirky little puzzle game (that has since taken the world by storm) was once intended to be left to fend for itself on Xbox Live Arcade, and actually got rejected by Microsoft.
So says Valve’s marketing director Doug Lombardi in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, quoting the infamous 150MB file size limit as the cause. The Source engine is no lightweight, after all:
“…the platform holders aren’t doing that right now. There’s a size limit and all kinds of other things.
“We’ve asked them, we said we were open to it. So it’s a decision for the platform holder and how they want to make the games available and how much bandwidth they want to [allow].”
Would The Orange Box have been as popular without Portal? Probably. But would Portal have been as big as it is without the huge market exposure it got by being part of The Orange Box?
Interesting thing to ponder.
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