Xbox head: Cloud destruction demo was a prototype for Crackdown

At their yearly Build conference in April, Microsoft engineers showed what they then referred to as a “prototype,” demonstrating the potential of their Azure/Xbox Compute cloud platform to render complicated real-time destruction in open worlds.

At their press conference Monday morning, Microsoft debuted a trailer for Crackdown that included some very familiar looking environmental destruction:

In response to a question about this similarity from a user on Twitter, Spencer replied that the “build demo was early Crackdown work.”