Being the most important launch title for Microsoft, it must have been quite the drama in the MS camp when it became clear that Perfect Dark Zero would not make launch day…at least not the normal way. So in order to guarantee Xbox 360 launch-day availability, Microsoft sent the game to manufacture before it had passed certification. This was a huge gamble, if the game hadn’t passed certification; Microsoft would have been left with 700,000 useless copies of the game.

The certification process is the final stage a game goes through before manufacture. Here the games are thoroughly tested to make sure there are no bugs, that menus all work correctly, and that there are no compatibility issues. If any bugs are discovered the games are sent back to publishers and developers for changes. The process can take days, or even weeks.

[PDZ executive producer Jim Veevaert told Next Generation, "Typically we go through a certification process to get a game finished and then we release to manufacturing. We took some risks and manufactured the disks over five days before certification."

When asked about the risks involved he said, "If the certification had not passed, we would have had hundreds of thousands of disks on our hands. It was us taking a risk to get the game there day one and there for launch."

He said, "Typically you can take upwards of 12 to 14 days to go through certification. In this case we didn't have the time, so we said 'go for it'."

He said the team was confident, if not certain, that the certification would pass. "The team had been going through the game over the last few weeks to get us to a point where we felt really comfortable. Rare does a lot of work in terms of polishing the game so we felt pretty confident it was time to let it go."

Microsoft has manufactured 700,000 copies of Perfect Dark Zero for the U.S. market, with a target hardware tie-ratio of 1:1. Veevaert said that figure was based on the early launch period of the hardware, and that a further run is expected in the days ahead.]

Source: next-gen.biz