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'."

Various titles previously expected for the system's launch, such as Team NINJA's Dead or Alive 4 (X360) and Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (X360, PC), have been delayed, which makes Perfect Dark Zero's rush to market a bit surprising. Microsoft claims that the after-the-fact certification process was held to the same standards as it would have been in a more normal scenario. Given that Perfect Dark Zero is being published by Microsoft Game Studios and was developed by a Microsoft-owned studio, however, it's hard not to speculate that the completely internally produced game wasn't given some leeway. After all, Microsoft has been spending an incredible amount of money on the 360's launch, with what surely must be more free consoles thrown around than have ever been officially thrown around before, and software sales are going to be a big part of making that money back. Having to simply write off 700,000 worthless copies of a game seems like a risk that might have been perhaps a bit too risky.

There's also the question of precedent. Of course, a console only launches once, so this situation may prove to be unique. Traditionally, consoles are seen as having less of the "ship it now, patch it later" mentality that can sometimes plague PC gaming. In that light, moves like this are slightly worrying. The 360 may not launch again, but Microsoft will certainly have more big launches within the system's life cycle. Surely, many remember the set-in-stone Halo 2 launch date brouhaha that Microsoft's Peter Moore immortalized with a (temporary) tattoo on his arm, and many have claimed that the game would have been much better served with some more development time, not an allegiance to that date--including many actual Bungie team members, if you watch the documentary on the game's development.