Before From Software got medieval in Demon's Souls, the team made a beloved Xbox 360 mecha game. From Softwarethe world-famous studio behind the Souls serieshasn't always been counted as one of the more successful and well-established studios in the Japanese game development scene. spite garnering a little attention with games like Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven and the Armored Core series, before their breakthrough with Demon's Souls in 2010, the studio struggled to make any kind of verifiable impact on a large scale in the West. Even the direct backing of Sony did little to guide them to the loving audience they enjoy today.
In the early 00's, as the studio's plans for the future were laid out internally, there was one project in particular that would push the boundaries of what their team had done before. To back their ambition, and to take advantage of the company's flagship multiplayer network, it was decided the game would release on Microsoft's new console, the Xbox 360. From also knew that for their ideas to have any chance of working out as they'd hoped, they would needed a global audience. Sega was brought on board to handle the marketing and publishing side, as well as a lot of the technical challenges behind its, at the time, hugely ambitious online mode.
The result of that partnership was Chromehounds, a predominantly online-based console exclusive involving the building and battling of giant, fully customisable mecha known as Hounds. Releasing exclusively for the Xbox 360, it was far from being the mind-blowing, genre-defining beast they needed it to be. In fact, Chromehounds was a commercial failure in every sense.
