The Bizarre Creations programmer who innocently mentioned that some graphical niceties had to be dropped from Xbox 360 racer Project Gotham Racing 4 due to a lack of DVD storage space can’t ever have imagined it would come to this.

But let’s rewind a bit here, and take in the story so far. On 27 July, Bizarre staffer ‘Ben’ wrote the following on the company’s official forums: "You won't see different times of day per city [in Project Gotham Racing 4] because this involves recreating all the textures again (one for day and one for night). Whilst this wasn't a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data onto a single DVD. So we've worked around the problem by providing different lighting models per city."

Such a statement may seem relatively innocuous, but the internet read between the lines. This developer’s opinion, declared several media outlets, was evidence that DVD9 - the medium used by Xbox 360 - simply didn’t offer the storage space required to match the ambitions of the PGR 4 team. And if it didn’t match their ambitions, who else would find DVD9 wanting in the future?

Skip forward a few days to 01 August, and Sony’s Dave Karraker was using Bizarre/Ben’s comments as proof that Sony had made the right choice to stick a Blu-ray drive in the PlayStation 3. "We took a lot of heat at launch for including Blu-ray in PS3," a smug Karraker told GamesIndustry.biz. "Now it looks like that investment is being justified. Next generation games simply need more space on the disc to contain all that high definition content."

Today, we were treated to Round 3, with Bizarre publishing an explanation for Ben’s original comments, in which it accused "fanboys" of taking the comments and "blowing them out of all proportion." Hear that, Dave Karraker? You’re a fanboy.

"DVD size is absolutely not a factor that we consider when designing our games... and PGR4 is no exception. DVD9 gives us more than we need to create a fabulous experience," reads Bizarre’s back-tracking statement, before adding, "We've never had to cut content to fit on the disc, and we probably never will. Each next-gen format has its own merits […] It's not a case of one system having less of this, and the other having more of that."

So, is this a genuine mistake from Ben, an all-too-convenient interpretation of his comments from the "fanboys", or is anyone else sensing Bizarre may have had a friendly knock on the door in the middle of the night from Microsoft? The plot thickens.