 Deathrow was developed by Southend Interactive and produced by Ubisoft Entertainment . Five friends opened Southend in Malmö , Sweden in 1998 to fulfill their childhood ambitions to make video games . Southend began Deathrow development in May 1999 and expected the game to be an online PC video game tentatively titled Blitz Disc Arena . The idea for the sports game descended from a combination of Speedball 2 , the Quake and Unreal series , and Tekken . Southend 's nine @-@ person team received Xbox development kits in June 2000 and decided to move the game to console in early 2001 . According to Southend animator Rodrigo Cespedes in a 2002 TeamXbox interview , " Xbox was the only console that would allow [ them ] to produce the game as it was originally envisioned " , adding that Microsoft and Ubisoft encouraged the mature direction with emphasis on blood , brutality , and profanity . Thus they began to port the game to the console for its feature capabilities , including vertex and pixel shaders for bump mapped environmental textures and character animations , specular lighting , and bumped reflection mapping . 
