At this year’s BAFTA annual games lecture, Quantic Dream head of development, David Cage, confirmed that Microsoft turned down Heavy Rain due to their discomfort with the game’s child kidnapping story.
“We were pitching Heavy Rain to different publishers, including Sony, and we went to Microsoft,” he told attendees.
“We had a very long talk and they loved Fahrenheit, and they really wanted to do something with us. They got scared by the fact that Heavy Rain was about kids being kidnapped, and they said, ‘This is an issue, we want to change it’. Well, we could have kidnapped cats, it would be a different experience! For me, that was a very interesting signal. It was like, you know what, I don’t think we can work together, because you don’t understand what I’m to achieve here.”
“They were scared of the scandal and scared of what people may write and what people may think. ‘Oh, this is a developer and the publisher making games about a child getting kidnapped’. When you play Heavy Rain, I don’t think this is what the game is about. Microsoft is a great company; I’m not complaining or criticizing. I’m just saying that there was some resistance at the time that was not in sync with what we wanted to achieve,” he added.
As we all know Heavy Rain eventually went on to become a PlayStation 3 exclusive and a pretty good one too.
Source: Digital Spy