Remember Ed Fries? He was one of the main executives to help Microsoft get a foothold in the console business. During the original Xbox days, he essentially served in the role that Shane Kim had until Kim was recently promoted. Not only did Fries oversee game publishing but he was crucial to the acquisitions of developers like Bungie, Rare and Ensemble Studios.

Since leaving Microsoft in 2004, he's worked on a variety of projects, but his first real video game endeavor since leaving is an independent developer called Airtight Games (read more about them here), which he co-founded with the core team behind Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge. GameDaily BIZ had the pleasure of speaking at length with Fries about his new project for 360, PS3 and PC Dark Void (to be published by Capcom in Spring '09) and about the current state of Xbox from his viewpoint.

Fries began by detailing the Crimson Skies team's ambition to get out of the airplane and incorporate some on-foot gameplay. Fries said that would have to wait for the sequel, but Fries left Microsoft and the sequel got canned. So eventually, the core members decided they'd had enough of Microsoft and wanted to start a new independent developer with Fries' help. Airtight was officially formed in 2004, but it's not until now that their first project is really receiving any kind of exposure.

Dark Void was in fact one of the first games signed by Capcom's new U.S. outfit. It wasn't easy for Airtight, however. Like most developers, Fries was stressed by the process of successfully pitching his game. "[Capcom] basically gave us about three months of funding to put together a prototype that would prove to them that these ideas we had for the game were going to be something cool and exciting," he described.

"We were talking about doing a sort of continuation of the ideas of Crimson Skies but adding on-foot, but that's a lot to do in three months. ... It was a herculean effort. We got it all together for the prototype meeting but it was just barely holding together. [Fries chuckles] I remember we went down and visited Capcom and we knew it wasn't everything we wanted it to be... In the end, even though there were a bunch of problems with it they agreed to fund the full project. It was weird; we flew home and I had mixed feelings. On the one hand we were excited that we got the project funded, but on the other hand something was kind of eating at me... I realized as soon as you started walking around the game just felt like every other first-person shooter. I felt like we were doing the same thing everyone else was doing.

"I sat down with the team on Monday and told them 'I think we can finish the game as is and it would be an OK game but I don't want to spend the next couple years making an OK game. I want to do something new, that hasn't been done before... If we're going to make a change now's the time to do it; we're right at the end of prototype'," Fries elaborated. And so with that, the project that was to become Dark Void was about to get a facelift.

Dark Void takes place in a parallel universe called, you guessed it, the Void.

Fries noted that Capcom mentioned something quite interesting at their meeting: essentially that 3-D games aren't truly 3-D. "The more I thought about that, the more I realized it was true," he said. "In a first-person or third-person shooter the camera basically sits on a ball that rotates around the character. As a player, it feels right when you move that around in the horizontal plane... so it sort of forces all the action to be down in this plane, in front or around you. So I spoke to [our designer] Jose to see if we could do something to free up this 3-D space... Ultimately he came up with this idea of vertical cover combat, taking a shooter and tipping it up into this whole new dimension of battling up and down things. And then you get a hover pack and jet pack... and all of a sudden it broke open the game in all these new ways. Once we made that core gameplay change it rippled through the entire project."

Fries couldn't be happier with Capcom and the support they've given his team on Dark Void. "Capcom's always been a company that takes risks – look at Okami – and it's a very developer driven culture. They're very supportive of innovation," he said.