Splinter Cell dev says the Chaos Theory team "couldn't have gotten more out of the hardware if we wanted to," thanks to a "paradigm shift" fueled by the original Xbox

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory represented almost the very best of the graphical technology available at the time, and the team behind it would have been hard-pressed to have pushed it any further.

Speaking to Edge Magazine, Clint Hocking - creative director on Chaos Theory and a writer and designer on the original Splinter Cell - said that when it came to the third game in the iconic stealth series, "we couldn't have gotten more out of the hardware if we wanted to. In many ways, Chaos theory and a small handful of other titles led the transition to a sort of pseudo-next generation."

That not-quite new generation was kickstarted by the original Xbox. Arriving more than 18 months after the PS2, and well after the Sega Dreamcast, Hocking says that Microsoft's first console kicked off a "paradigm shift in rendering technology." As with any new console, it would take a few years until developers worked out how to get the most out of the hardware - but by the time Chaos Theory arrived, a few months before the Xbox 360, Hocking and his team had pushed it as far as they thought it could go.

That work paid off. While Chaos Theory was well-received on most major platforms, it was clearly at its best on Xbox, where it still boasts its best scores to this day. Hocking maintains that the improved lighting and rendering on that platform compared to the PS2 and PC releases was only "made possible for the first time by the Xbox."

Don't believe us? Check out our list of the best Xbox games of all time.