Talking Point: The Dev Who Greenlit Insomniac’s Xbox One Classic Is Retiring

We wish we’d have seen more

by Ben Kerry Yesterday, 6pm

Today, Insomniac Games has announced that its legendary CEO Ted Price is retiring from the company, after more than 30 years at the helm. While Insomniac has always been closely aligned with PlayStation — Sony now owns the studio outright — the team did produce an Xbox One classic back in 2014 – and Ted Price played a big part in that happening.

Of course, we’re talking about Sunset Overdrive here – we never miss out on an opportunity to chat about this game! Yep, if you cast your minds back to before this title launched, Price helped introduce this game on the Xbox stage at E3 2014. We remember it well – it was so exciting to get an Insomniac exclusive on Xbox back then.

To this day, we’re still quite disappointed to have never gotten another big Insomniac title on the platform. The team went on to create PlayStation exclusive Spider-Man games with Sony, before eventually being bought out by the PlayStation owner. We’d have taken anything; a Sunset Overdrive sequel, a spin-off, a new IP – anything else from Insomniac!

Alas, that just wasn’t meant to be, but we’re still thankful that Price greenlit this game internally before heading out to strike a publishing deal on it – a venture that led them to Microsoft in the end. 10 years later we still have fond memories of this title, and Insomniac certainly made its mark on the Xbox One library as a result. We wish you well in your retirement, Ted!

Do you have fond memories of Sunset Overdrive on Xbox? Talk to us about this game and its developer down below.

Ben is a News Writer at Pure Xbox, and is a fan of action, racing and straight-up shootin’ in any Xbox game he can get his hands on. When he’s not clutching an Xbox controller like his life depends on it, Ben spends his time listening to music that’s far too old for him, watching football on the telly and probably eating somewhere.

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