Rare pitched Avatars for Xbox 360 launch

Rare has said the Xbox 360 avatars were a feature originally intended to launch long ago.

"The concept of avatars is something that we came up with about four years ago now," Mark Betteridge, studio boss, told GamesIndustry.biz.

"We were thinking about how hardcore and spiky the previous Xbox was, and everybody was of a view that the new one was going to be more smooth and friendly. Everybody was in agreement that was the right thing.

"So we pitched avatars as something out of the box with an interface where you build a character that looks like yourself, or whoever you want it to look like, and can play mini-games and things like that - but it represents you on the Live system, that's all it was based around," he added.

Plenty more through there.