Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series, has signed on with Microsoft to produce two titles for the next version of the Xbox.
Sakaguchi will lead the development of two role-playing games for the successor to the current Xbox, Microsoft said in a statement on Thursday. The two games will be exclusive to the Xbox and will be published by Microsoft's Game Studios group
The next Xbox console is widely expected to be out by year's end. Microsoft introduced the current Xbox game console, the first model, in late 2001. As of December 31, the company had sold 19.9 million consoles worldwide, 13.2 million of which were in North America, 5 million in Europe and 1.7 million in Japan and the Asia-Pacific region.
More than 60 million copies of the multiple instalments of Final Fantasy have been sold worldwide, according to publisher Square Enix. The hugely successful games have been imitated many times.
Sakaguchi last year left game publisher Square USA, where he was president, to launch his own development studio, called Mistwalker.
Details of the arrangement between Sakaguchi and Microsoft were not disclosed.