The Curious Case of the Durango Devkit Leak
It’s one of the most bizarre next-gen console leaks yet – a story so strange we still struggle to believe there’s any true to it whatsoever. When a Microsoft Durango devkit appeared on an obscure developer forum – for sale at $10,000 no less – nobody quite knew for certain what on earth was going on. The shots depict an anonymous-looking PC tower case, attached to a cheap display and running Matrix-style datastream graphics over an unconvincing debug launcher. The obvious conclusion drawn by many was that it was an unambiguous fake. Intrigued, Digital Foundry reached out to the source of the leak, and followed up the story with multiple developers working on next-gen projects. The uniform response was startling: apparently, these shots are the real deal. The devkit itself is an anonymous-looking black box, said by one next-gen developer to contain parts that have much in common with a modern “standard gaming PC”. The shots depict a dashboard reminiscent of the current Xbox 360 test kit launcher, featuring a basic compiled program, dubbed “D3D11Game1” along with “NuiView” – which on 360 at least is a simple tool for rendering camera views and data from an attached Kinect peripheral. No next-gen Kinect hardware photos have yet to surface, but it is said to be considerably revised from the existing Xbox 360/PC peripheral. We tracked down the man who leaked the initial shots, who uses the alias “DaE”. At the time we spoke over instant messaging, he was seemingly running rampant across Europe, quaffing significant amounts of absinth. Being generous, his Twitter feed doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, and some of the claims being made about Halo 4 running on PowerPC/Xbox 360 emulators would stretch even Roger Moore’s prodigious eyebrow-raising skills to absolute breaking point. However, the fact is that the pictures he leaked have been acknowledged as genuine by reliable sources we know to be working on AAA next-gen games, and the inescapable conclusion is that the leaker has indeed been hands-on with a Durango devkit – and then tried to sell it. DaE told us that this was a prank he played on the administrator of the AssemblerGames forum – the end result being that he was banned for his efforts and the offending post swiftly removed. Read more…
