According to PlayStation veteran Chris Deering, Sony was anxious about the original Xbox and that concern prompted the company to sign an exclusivity deal with Take-Two for Grand Theft Auto.
“We were worried when we saw Xbox coming,” Deering recalled at a recent EGX event in London, as reported by GI.biz. “We knew exclusivity was the name of the game in a lot of fields.”
With that concern in mind, Deering said he approached third-party publishers and developers to ask if they would be interested in taking a “special deal” for timed exclusivity for any of their upcoming games. Deering and company didn’t realize GTA would become such a massive franchise, but that bet seemed to pay off, as GTA III took the series into a new direction with a 3D open-world approach.