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. Normal-mapping was a new graphics toy then; we’d really not seen it before on a console. But the Xbox was fully capable, and other games on the console besides Riddick went on to put it to good use.
But back to Riddick. The Starbreeze team proceeded to show us a first-person prison-break game with insane lighting, RPG-like dialogue with myriad NPCs, an awesome hide-in-the-shadows stealth system built around the titular anti-hero’s “eye shine” that allows him to see in the dark, some horror elements, and a reasonable bit of first-person shooting as well. And when we got our hands on the full game ahead of its release in June 2004, they’d successfully built an entire game this good. It had the graphics, the audio, the atmosphere, the story, the gameplay. It had everything.
Riddick didn’t just break the licensed-game curse, it was a bona fide Game of the Year contender on Xbox that year (it was won by a little game called Halo 2 that released in November of that year). And if you’re wondering, “Wait, what licensed-game curse?” For you younger readers, video games based on licensed properties were almost universally, take-it-to-the-bank guaranteed to be terrible. This wasn’t for a lack of effort by game developers. Rather, it was game publishers who thought they could spend the least amount of money possible – be it on talent, length of development cycle, or both – and it wouldn’t matter because people would buy the game anyway because of the licensed property adorning the front of the box. And I suppose they must’ve been right on some level, because for years, good (let alone great) licensed games were the exception, not the rule.
Riddick was the first crack in that dam that has since broken (see also: Batman: Arkham Asylum). It’s certainly not that every licensed game is good now, but games like Riddick and Batman: Arkham have finally shown publishers that if they invest in top talent and give them sufficient resources, that they can make way, way more money than just going for the cheap cash grab.
Also, Vin Diesel himself deserves some credit as well, even if Starbreeze gets the lion’s share of it. Diesel was (and presumably still is) a big gamer, and he took an active role in the project through his Tigon Studios development team that assisted on Escape from Butcher Bay. Diesel didn’t want his character headlining a crappy game any more than players did, and in partnering with the then-relatively-unknown Starbreeze, he helped make sure that Richard B. Riddick wouldn’t suffer the same fate so many other characters making the transition from the big screen to the game-console screen did.
As phenomenal as Escape from Butcher Bay was, it’s arguably still pretty criminally underrated. If you never got a chance to play it, it’s not too late. Sure, the graphics won’t blow you away (or even impress you) in 2026, but the gameplay holds up pretty well.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.