10 Biggest Surprises In E3 History

Ever since Final Fantasy VII - when Squaresoft abandoned Nintendo's hardware to take advantage of the CD technology that would play a large part in the original PlayStation's success - the mainline Final Fantasy games have been PlayStation exclusives.

Sure, there has been the odd offshoot. The likes of Crystal Chronicles and Final Fantasy XI showed up on the GameCube and PC respectively, but it looked for all the world that the series would stay firmly in the Sony camp for a long time to come.

That all changed at E3 2008 when Square Enix president Yoichi Wada turned up at the end of Microsoft's conference to announce that Final Fantasy XIII would be making its way to the Xbox 360.

The announcement came as an enormous surprise to fans, not least because the game had previously been stated to be a PS3 exclusive. Perhaps even more shocking was the fact that the series, which is so steeped in JRPG tradition, was going to appear on a console that was very much the loser in the Japanese console wars.

Sony had lost one of its killer apps and the announcement was another nail in the coffin of the platform-exclusive game as we used to know them.