Talking recently to Edge as part of a wider feature on new racer Blur, Bizarre Creations’ creative director Martyn Chudley recounted the company’s increasingly strained relationship with Project Gotham Racing publisher Microsoft prior to the studio being acquired by Activision.

“I’m not going to slag [Microsoft] off in an evil way, but obviously we worked on PGR4 for them, and I think that PGR4 was the strongest Gotham game we did – the most fully rounded. But towards the end of that project they wanted us to bring it in early, to chop six weeks off development. But the way we work is really right up to the wire, so basically the game is nowhere near finished at six weeks to go, so we had to dig our heels in and say that our contract said that we’re to bring the game in on this day, and that’s what we were going to do because we cannot compromise the work that the lads have been doing, and the quality of the game,” Chudley said.

“They didn’t realise how bad a situation it would have been – we needed that extra six weeks, and it got us concerned with the future with Microsoft… We were getting disillusioned with Microsoft and they were getting corporate and cocky as well because of the shift in power between them and Sony.”

According to Chudley, Microsoft’s main focus was always on its first party developer Turn 10 Studios, the team behind the Forza Motorspot series.

“And that was at the expense of us,” he said. “They brought out the Forza [Xbox 360 console] bundle. And that was disappointing, because the guys worked so hard on [PGR4]. It just didn’t get the exposure and the marketing – it got the critical acclaim, but wasn’t as commercially successful as the other projects... Microsoft always had – I’m painting a bad picture; we had a really good relationship right up to the very end – but they always had other agendas, which were primarily about selling Xbox.”

Check out the rest of the interview here, and catch the extensive Blur feature in Edge 202, on sale now.