This Xbox 360 Horror Game Should Have Been Microsoft’s Resident Evil

In early 2005, developer Monolith Productions announced it was working on a new horror game for PC and an unnamed next-gen console. That console ended up being the Xbox 360, which launched later that year. Included in the 360’s launch lineup was Monolith’s Condemned: Criminal Origins. The terrifying survival horror game was meant to be a massive expanded universe for Monolith and publisher Sega, with Xbox seemingly set to be one of the beneficiaries, but that ultimately never worked out, and Microsoft missed out on helping launch a series that could’ve challenged Resident Evil.

Condemned: Criminal Origins Should’ve Been the Start of Something Great

As one of the Xbox 360’s launch games, Condemned: Criminal Origins performed well critically and commercially. It scored highly with reviewers across the board, with many praising its visuals and superb sound design. Condemned with the fifth-highest-selling 360 launch game, far outpacing the developers’ anticipations.

From the jump, the team believed Condemned was going to become a major franchise. Two months before Criminal Origins’ release, they dropped a six-part flash game, Condemned: The Prequel Story, to help drum up hype. In the month leading up to Condemned‘s launch, Warner Bros. announced that it was working on a film set in the same fictional universe as the game.

Remember, this was happening before Condemned: Criminal Origins was released. And that was only the tip of the iceberg. Monolith claimed that it had mapped out three additional games before Criminal Origins‘ release. You don’t often see a developer this invested in an unknown product, but it’s clear that Monolith was very confident in Condemned as a franchise.

Thankfully, they were rewarded with the previously mentioned excellent review scores. Condemned was officially a hit, and for what it’s worth, it has stood the test of time as a horror and first-person melee game. Criminal Origins might be a forgotten classic, but it’s a classic nonetheless, and a game that’s still worth playing if you’re a horror fan.

The Beginning of the End for Condemned‘s Expanded Universe

Monolith obviously had a plan for Condemned‘s future, and the first game was a smashing success. So what went wrong? Why aren’t we seeing that fourth Condemned that the developer scoped out on Xbox Series X? Well, there are several reasons the Condemned series eventually flopped.

Let’s start with that film Warner Bros. was talking about before Criminal Origins was released. Jace Hall, one of Monolith’s co-founders, had become the vice president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment in 2004, and was one of the believers in Condemned as an expanded universe.

In a 2004 interview, Hall said, “We wanted to create a universe that, like Star Wars, was big enough where different stories could exist.” That led to the team bringing in Kurt Sutter to write the script. To that point, he was mostly known for writing several episodes of The Shield, but would go on to create Sons of Anarchy and write Southpaw. In 2007, Tarsem Singh, best known for the adventure fantasy film The Fall, was brought in to direct.

Unfortunately, that was the last we ever heard from the Condemned film project. Meanwhile, Monolith was working on the sequel to Criminal Origins. And this time, it wouldn’t be a console exclusive, as Condemned 2: Bloodshot was coming to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Sure, 360 owners got it a week early, but that might be the smallest exclusivity window we’ve ever seen.

Critically, Bloodshot performed about as well as the original. Most reviewers agreed that it improved on Criminal Origins in nearly every aspect, bringing a dreadful atmosphere, gorgeously ugly visuals, and terrifying sound design. It’s tough to find official sales numbers, but in a 2015 interview, Hall noted that “both games sold well.”

Sadly, we’ve never seen another Condemned game from Monolith. There are surely a myriad of reasons a third game never happened. After all, Monolith had two successful horror series running at the time, as F.E.A.R. and its sequel were also hits, so its resources were a little split. Soon after F.E.A.R. 2 launched, Warner Bros. moved the team to licensed projects instead of original property.

That move eventually resulted in one of Monolith’s biggest successes, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. The 2014 game created the popular Nemesis system and quickly became a best-seller. The next year, Hall made a Facebook post, noting that he was “contemplating finding an interested and proven indie development team so that they can take over [Condemned] and move it forward.”

Ultimately, nothing ever came out of that post. And Monolith released the sequel to Mordor, Middle-earth: Shadow of War. It was filled with microtransactions and featured a bloated world, leading to a lackluster critical response. Monolith eventually made things right, but Shadow of War was the final game the studio made before Warner Bros. closed its doors in 2025.

There’s no one thing to point to that explains why Condemned failed, but the oversight from Warner Bros. is probably the biggest reason. It’s too bad someone like Microsoft, which saw how successful Condemned could be, didn’t step in to keep the series rolling. The good news is that Hall is the sole owner of the Condemned intellectual property, so there’s still hope that Condemned 3 might become a reality someday.

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