Development
The origin of three Burger King-themed Xbox games, including Sneak King, began when senior executives from Microsoft and Burger King met at Cannes to accept awards for their I Love Bees and Subservient Chicken advertising campaigns. Microsoft and Burger King's executives decided to produce Xbox games that would take place in Burger King-themed context that would not be reduced to blatant advertisements. Blitz Games Studios would become involved in the project after Blitz Games Studios' co-founder, Philip Oliver, discussed an interest in producing Xbox Live games with Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade portfolio manager, Ross Erickson. Oliver's interest was hampered by a lack of funding, but Erickson agreed to notify Oliver of any leads on advertisers looking for product placement. A week or two after that, Oliver received a call from Erickson about Burger King's interest in creating three games. In the fall of 2005, Blitz Games entered into talks with Burger King and the development began in February 2006.
The development originally began as downloadable Xbox Live games, but Burger King soon announced that they wanted the games to also be playable on the Xbox. This would require distribution of the games in boxes instead of digitally because the original Xbox console platform was not able to access Xbox Live Arcade. With physical distribution in mind, Burger King wanted both the Xbox and Xbox 360 versions of the game to be available on the same disc. For the project, Blitz Games assigned two project managers for the games, Chris Swan and John Jarvis. Swan and Jarvis held daily conference calls with Burger King and Microsoft's Xbox division throughout the development period. In order to better work together, Blitz Games showed Burger King the development process for a previous game, from "first the black and white sketches, then the color concepts, environment blockouts, texturing and lighting, and finally the results on screen." By showing an example of their workflow process, Blitz Games hoped to bridge the presentation gap between the companies that could potentially "cripple the project."
Originally Blitz Games had a staff of fifteen working on the original project, but this grew to nearly 80 people after Burger King increased the contract and budget for the games. The task of producing two different versions of the games were made easier by Blitz Games' production toolchain, which had built-in compatibility for Xbox. Blitz Studios' developers were able to adjust the game with appropriate hardware coding that had already been previously developed by the company.[5] Blitz Games extended their development cycle by two months: one month due to challenges in production, and the other because Microsoft agreed to "fast track" the games through the Quality Assurance process. The development period concluded after three months, with the completion of all three games and the production of two million units of each game.[6]
Burger King and Blitz Studios split the creative process up for the three games. Sneak King is the game that Burger King had creative control over, and which was envisioned based on the King commercials.[7] Oliver stated, "Sneak King is derived by them, purely from their commercials. It was basically 'here's our commercials, we have to have a video game around them.' They threw in all their ideas, and we made it work."[7] Originally, Sneak King was designed as a tile-based puzzle game, but it soon evolved into a Spy vs Spy caper with multiple Kings who are "trying to out-deliver one another while laying traps for their enemies".
Burger King's creative control over the game impacted its development defined as a set of rules. The first rule was that there was only one King character. In response, the developers had the idea of the Xbox avatars playing the game and finding the crown to become the King. This idea was rejected by Burger King who said players could not become the King. The developers' next idea was to have one person be the King and the other players lay traps to interfere with his deliveries, but this idea was again rejected by Burger King because the King could not be exposed to any danger. With the usual hazards and competition elements of the video games removed, the developers decided upon a stealth format with no human opponents. In order to better capture the accuracy and authenticity of the King's movements, the King was flown to Britain for motion capture for the game's production. Blitz Games' Edward Linley described Sneak King as the riskiest game concept of the project because it "is the appearance and antics of the King himself that give the game its humor and life; without him, the game simply wouldn't work. Until we had the finished King model and motion capture in the game, we couldn't be certain the concept would gel. Fortunately, the moment he went in, we knew we had created something truly unique." Sneak King's programming code consists of 60,000 active lines with another 43,000 developer comment lines.[8]
