Midway Sports on Online Play

[A Black Falcon]

Article discusses mostly other topics (how Midway's sports games are going more sim-like because of getting farther away from them having to be arcade games), but this was interesting.


http://cube.ign.com/articles/400/400552p1.html

JD: If I had my way, we'd be online with everything. But, obviously, what we wanted to do is make sure that we cut our teeth well, so PS2 is the logical first system for us to do, so we're going to debut this year on PS2. Getting the tournament structure we wanted to do on Xbox Live proved more complicated that we'd have hoped for, so we've been talking to Microsoft to see if there's a way that we can get it online this year. We don't think there will be, so we'll be debuting probably next year's products with the Xbox Live support. Again, I want to be clear. It's not because we didn't want to do Xbox Live, it's just that because that system works in a different way, we didn't feel like we could do justice this year to our Xbox consumers. We didn't just want to give them a simple, match-up, head-to-head play, we wanted to give them the ultimate online experience. In terms of GameCube, we'd love to do [it for] GameCube as well, and in fact we talked to Nintendo just yesterday about this very thing. Nintendo themselves need to get excited about offering their consumers online, so your GameCube consumers really need to be telling Nintendo that's what they want. They need to get more adapters out there, and they need to be asking Nintendo, "Look, do this for us." Prove to us that there's a market for it. We would love to put this stuff on the GameCube as well. The idea of all these people being able to play each other across platforms would be awesome, too.