Heavy Rain Was Rejected By Microsoft Over Storyline

Following an article from Digital Spy, David Cage was speaking at this year’s BAFTA annual games lecture and has revealed that Microsoft had turned down Heavy Rain.  Microsoft wanted David Cage to remove the child kidnapping storyline, but Cage rightfully point blank refused.  The reason why Heavy Rain is so powerful is its immensely powerful storyline and it wouldn’t be the game that we know it to be today if that element was changed.  After all, it was Heavy Rain’s powerful story that provided the tagline “How far would you go to save someone you love?”

David Cage said that Microsoft was “scared” of the controversy it would cause. Below is what was said by Mr Cage

“We were pitching Heavy Rain to different publishers, including Sony, and we went to Microsoft,” he told attendees including Digital Spy.

“They got scared by the fact that Heavy Rain was about kids being kidnapped, and they said, ‘This is an issue, we want to change it’. Well, we could have kidnapped cats; it would be a different experience!

“They were scared of the scandal and scared of what people may write and what people may think.’Oh, this is a developer and the publisher making games about a child getting kidnapped.”

“When you play Heavy Rain, I don’t think this is what the game is about. Microsoft is a great company; I’m not complaining or criticising. I’m just saying that there was some resistance at the time that was not in sync with what we wanted to achieve.”

Cage continued: “We had this conversation with Sony very honestly saying, ‘Okay, there is a reason here’. But I think they understand the upside of what we were doing.”

“We could understand each other, and this is how Heavy Rain happened.”

You can read the article in full from Digital Spy by clicking HERE.

So there you have it, Xbox 360 and possibly PC gamers could have had Heavy Rain on their formats, which could have possibly led on to David Cages next game Beyond Two Souls being multiformat, which stars Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe.

Heavy Rain will go down as one the best games of its generation, but Microsoft’s desire to change the story led to it being a PS3 exclusive.

Are there any Xbox 360 gamers out there that would have loved to play this game and even Beyond: Two Souls for that matter?  If so, let us know in the comments section below.

Beyond: Two Souls is a PS3 exclusive and will be released in North America on October 8th and then the 11th across Europe.