Development of "Perfect Dark Zero" began on the Nintendo GameCube with a very small team of roughly ten people. At the time, Nintendo had a 49% stake in Rare, making the company a Nintendo second-party developer. According to lead designer Chris Tilston, "it was basically prototyping, finding out where we could go and how we could get there". When Rare was purchased by Microsoft in 2002, the project was transferred to the Xbox console and the game's multiplayer mode was redesigned for Xbox Live online play. Tilston revealed that at one point they got to 50 players online simultaneously, but the graphics "just couldn't handle it". Since the initial version of the game pushed the original Xbox hardware "pretty hard", the project was ultimately transferred to the Xbox successor, the Xbox 360. Tilston revealed that the original Xbox version was "about 12 months away" from completion when the shift occurred.