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From Midway to Xbox, The story of Seamus Blackley
Matey-O writes: "Red Herring has an interesting look at Seamus Blackley, the Man behind the Xbox, and what it took to bring the console to market." I like that this article points out the risks that Microsoft took by trying to enter a field with very established competition (and with mixed results, so far).
the demo froze" - glad to see M$ up to their old tricks again. ;o)
Video Game cheats, hints a
Email me and tell me what you think of widening!
That's not true... The XBox runs a stripped down version of Window 2000, as you can read at the Xbox-Linux site. These guys managed to get Apache running on that minimal W2k.
PROFILE
Captain Xbox
The inside story of how Seamus Blackley and a team of renegades persuaded Microsoft to build a video game console.
By Dean Takahashi
April 11, 2002
Bill Gates was showing off his new baby. It was March 2000, and thousands of people packed the room at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Jose, California, and the event was broadcast on TV worldwide. Standing on a dark, cavernous stage, Mr. Gates talked about the future of video games. He pulled a black shroud off a table and there was the machine, a shiny chrome box in the shape of the letter X, with a big green jewel in its center. "The modest tag line here is the future of console gaming," he said.
Offstage, Jonathan "Seamus" Blackley was worried sick. "I was under so much stress, it was remarkable I didn't explode," he recalls. The renegade program manager who was one of several co-creators of the Xbox, Mr. Blackley was a main character in an internal Microsoft insurgency that convinced Mr. Gates to spend an estimated $5 billion to $6 billion to enter the video game business. This was Mr. Blackley's spotlight moment. He and a small band of fellow renegades had convinced Mr. Gates that Microsoft had to field a non-PC box that didn't run Windows, that the company had to go into the money-losing hardware business, and that it had to defeat Sony's PlayStation 2 game console or surrender any hope of controlling technology in the living room.
Feigning confidence, Mr. Blackley walked on stage. He draped a leather jacket emblazoned with the acid-green Xbox logo over Mr. Gates's shoulders, then proceeded to wow the audience by showing on a big screen what the Xbox could do. With a controller in hand, he set off animations ranging from hundreds of Ping-Pong balls bouncing all over a room to a computer-animated woman practicing martial arts with a giant robot.
Everything went great until it looked like the demo froze. Backstage, Mr. Blackley's friends had a moment of horror when the action stopped on the screen; they thought the machine had crashed. That was all they needed: jokes about how Microsoft's blue screen of death--references to the familiar crashing of Windows--would now be part of video games. But Mr. Blackley had only pressed the Pause button, and he finished the demo without a hitch. The enthusiastic crowd showered him with applause.
The shiny box that Mr. Blackley had helped midwife from conception to delivery became Microsoft's weapon to take on Sony and Nintendo in the video game business and to make games the company's premier entertainment medium.
"We've put quite a budget behind this one, and we're going to break through in a very big way," Mr. Gates concluded to the audience of game developers. More than the marketing promises from the world's richest man, however, it was Mr. Blackley's demos that made this proposition credible.
The X-Man
Until the Xbox, few people outside the industry knew much about Mr. Blackley, but he was a familiar figure to many at the Game Developers Conference. Easy to spot in a crowd, Mr. Blackley is in his early 30s, stands 6 feet, 2 inches tall, weighs 190 pounds, and has the build of a linebacker. He has close-shorn red hair and wears studs in his ears. Raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he has mastered an eclectic mix of topics including cars, physics, jazz, and history. A friend describes him as "one of the first cool people I met among the geeks" in the games business.
He stood out in another way, too. A year earlier he'd been at the same trade show--but under much different circumstances.
Back then, he met with Johnny Wilson, the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine. Mr. Blackley's highly anticipated game, Trespasser: The Lost World, had just met with terrible reviews and lackluster sales. The game, which he undertook for Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Interactive, had been expected to propel computer games forward as an art form, but instead it became yet another example of the inferiority of games to movies. The gray-bearded Mr. Wilson was a kind of elder statesman among game journalists. He saw Mr. Blackley as an ambitious genius who had tried to break new ground, yet his magazine was one of those that panned the game.
The pair sat at the Microsoft booth at the end of the show, as workers were busy dismantling the exhibits. Mr. Blackley was mentally packing away his dreams. He had produced hit games before, and his intuition had never let him down, but now he worried that his career was ruined.
Mr. Wilson stretched out his hands to Mr. Blackley, and told him in a kindly voice, "Seamus, keep making games." The moment was too much for Mr. Blackley. He broke down in tears. "I figured no one would trust me to make a game again because I fucked up," he recalls. "It was an emotional disaster. It turned out, fucking up was a really good experience."
Mr. Blackley had learned one of the key lessons of being an entrepreneur: if you fail, get up and try again. The story of how Microsoft undertook the Xbox project mirrors the resurrection of Mr. Blackley. Though he wasn't the sole creator of the Xbox, his early collaborator, Ted Hase, gives him credit as the general who secured victory on the battlefield. And in November 2001, as Microsoft began selling millions of Xboxes, Mr. Blackley was the only original member of the team who was still involved in the project--a testament to the fierceness that can come from failure.
After the Trespasser debacle, Mr. Blackley took a job working on graphics technology at Microsoft on February 5, 1999. He had let down his idol, Mr. Spielberg, and he thought he craved the anonymity of quietly working on code. But Mr. Blackley wasn't one for sitting on the sidelines. Within days of joining the Redmond, Washington, giant, he changed course.
Sony had been touting the Internet-ready PlayStation 2 as a gadget that could eclipse the PC as the most useful digital appliance in the home. Many at Microsoft, from Mr. Gates down, mobilized in reaction.
Mr. Blackley teamed with graphics expert Otto Berkes, games evangelist Mr. Hase, and games marketer Kevin Bachus to explore the project before having obtained permission from their bosses--renegade behavior within Microsoft. This sort of behavior was tolerated by Mr. Gates and his lieutenants as long as the renegades were ultimately successful. The team proposed that Microsoft adapt the PC to be more like a console and, one by one, talked their superiors into supporting what they called Project Midway, so code-named because their machine would be midway between a PC and game console. It also raised memories of Americans beating the Japanese at the battle of Midway in World War II. It wasn't, perhaps, the most politically correct name for a project at a company that would need plenty of support from Japanese game publishers, but it was pure Mr. Blackley, who had the mind of a competitive gamer. He was so driven that he formed fast friendships with his comrades and quickly made enemies of his opponents. (The Midway project was later renamed the Xbox, after Microsoft's DirectX multimedia software, which runs the console.) He set aside his many interests--even breaking up with a longtime girlfriend--to devote himself entirely to the Xbox.
Mr. Blackley has a knack for getting people excited about new technology; he argued that equipping the game machine with the best technology from PCs would lead to the creation of new kinds of artistic expression. Game developers would use the Xbox to finally deliver the creative visions trapped in their heads. While Nintendo saw games as toys, and Sony viewed them as entertainment, Microsoft would come to regard them as art. And it would make a game console that was as easy to program as the PC, using the same familiar tools that developers had used for ages. That was in contrast to the unwieldy, untested tools that other console makers created for each of their new models. Also, Microsoft would take advantage of a PC's architecture, which computes images in a straightforward style, compared to the complex parallel processing of Sony's PlayStation 2, where programmers determine how to balance the processing load of each individual chip inside the machine. But unlike the PC, the Xbox would be a stable platform with uniform hardware. No more would developers have to make sure that their games ran on every conceivable graphics card or PC peripheral. Give the artists the platform they had always dreamed of, and they would flock to it, Mr. Blackley argued.
Boxing Match
The Xbox renegades made their pitch to Mr. Gates on May 5, 1999. In Microsoft's executive boardroom, they laid out their case. They faced opponents from the WebTV division of Microsoft. The rivals, backed by executives Craig Mundie and Jon DeVaan, believed PC technology was inferior to the PlayStation 2. They felt Microsoft should build a customized console around WebTV's technology, coming "up from the appliance" instead of "down from the PC" to battle Sony. They criticized the Xbox, loaded with a $55 hard disk drive, as too expensive for a machine that needed to sell at less than $300 in order to compete with Sony.
In one heated exchange, the WebTV team said the Xbox guys were clueless because they didn't have the presence of mind to include screws in their estimate of the cost of the console. But Mr. Blackley's team had rigged clever demos to show what the PC could do, and they appealed to Mr. Gates's own love of gadgetry; the Xbox team wanted to deliver a machine for the most enthusiastic gamers who don't really care how much they have to pay.
In that intense first meeting, Mr. Gates said that the goal was to contain Sony and grab a lasting foothold in the living room. Afterward, he asked both teams to keep going, but in the weeks that followed, Mr. Blackley enlisted crucial support from the game-development community. He invited star developers like Epic Games's Tim Sweeney to tell Microsoft brass that the Xbox idea was superior to WebTV. Arguments from developers--which Mr. Gates recognized had helped Microsoft triumph in the PC market--helped the Xbox team prevail. Microsoft's executives knew developer support was indispensable if the company was to succeed in the video game market.
Having a Ball
Mr. Blackley was almost giddy from the contact with Mr. Gates and Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer. He had participated in more meetings with the top dogs than any first-year Microsoft employee could ever hope to. In a meeting with the Xbox team a few weeks after the May 5 pitch, Mr. Ballmer started out bowling them over with one of his infamous monologues. He boomed, "The Xbox is the greatest fucking thing in the world! It's going to make billions! It's the greatest thing ever!"
Mr. Ballmer then hammered the team on its naÔve business model, but he offered a lot of encouragement in his own fashion. Once, when they were standing in line at the company cafeteria, Mr. Ballmer sneaked up behind them and bellowed, "It's the Xbox guys!"
"I almost peed in my pants," Mr. Blackley says. He looked over at Mr. Bachus, whose face went white, like someone who had just been caught in a crime. Mr. Blackley adds, "But at the same time, it was so motivating that he was showing everyone else there exactly who we were." As Mr. Ballmer moved closer, he joked more quietly, "Are you making any money yet?"
Even though the Xbox became a legitimate project at Microsoft, executive oversight caused angst for Mr. Blackley's cohorts. Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer weren't going to roll the dice and let Mr. Blackley run wild with the Xbox, as Steve Jobs had famously been allowed to do with the Macintosh at Apple Computer. In July 1999, Microsoft brought in Rick Thompson, the head of its hardware group, which sold 20 million mice a year, as well as a host of PC peripherals like joysticks and game controllers. He was joined a month later by J Allard, who had helped move Microsoft onto the Internet, to run the Xbox program. Suddenly, the Xbox renegades had lost control of their project and were forced to accept lesser roles: Mr. Blackley would assist game developers and create demos, and Mr. Bachus would sign up publishers to make games. Several team members, like Mr. Berkes and Mr. Hase, left the team and returned to their old jobs. Others left the company entirely. But Mr. Blackley and Mr. Bachus propped each other up and became servants to the cause; Mr. Blackley himself had no job to return to.
"Part of it was Trespasser," Mr. Blackley recalls. "I was not going to fail again. I decided I could react to Trespasser by making it make me stronger or weaker."
Mr. Blackley created a group of programming experts who could help developers finish their games, and he took charge of all demos of Xbox technology. He also worked with yet another group to create Xbox prototypes carved from blocks of solid aluminum, commandeering a lab set aside for Microsoft's toy division. Mr. Thompson set about trying to acquire a game publisher that would guarantee success for Xbox titles, but was unable to lasso the likes of Nintendo, Sega, and Square. Ed Fries, head of Microsoft's games publishing division, began approving Xbox titles but had to make sure they didn't eclipse the division's work on PC games. In a PC-focused company, it was still dangerous to neglect games for the PC.
Many of the Xbox team's original ideas were tossed aside, including the team's proposal that the Xbox run Microsoft's Windows operating system. Upon hearing this, Mr. Gates blew his top. But he eventually saw that Windows would only get in the way of developers creating great games.
On September 29, 1999, Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer signed off on Mr. Thompson's plan to spend $5 billion to $6 billion on the Xbox, with much of the money going to marketing and the costs of making the money-losing hardware. Mr. Allard and Mr. Blackley quarreled at first, but Mr. Blackley came to trust Mr. Allard's ability to sell ideas upward at Microsoft, and Mr. Allard said he gave Mr. Blackley "a lot of leash" to run wild with technical ideas.
In January 2000, Mr. Bachus and Mr. Blackley hit the road. For about four weeks, they traveled across Europe, the United States, and Japan meeting with publishers and developers. The trip proved crucial to the Xbox's initial success. "If Seamus had not gone out and gotten those demos early, then Xbox might not have had the momentum to be taken seriously," says Michael Abrash, a graphics expert who worked for Mr. Blackley on the Xbox. "There was a critical period there when someone had to make the outside world and people inside Microsoft feel like this was a project that was going to keep going. He did that."
Staying on the job was tough. Other team members tired of the constant bickering and of the plodding pace of Microsoft's management as it explored alternatives, like buying Sega or Nintendo, during late 1999 and early 2000. The talks with Sega stalled because it wasn't yet ready to give up on its Dreamcast hardware, and Microsoft only wanted the Japanese company's software teams. Mr. Blackley and others felt these talks were needless distractions and that Microsoft should go it alone.
When Mr. Thompson's hardware designers chose to use graphics technology from a little-known startup called GigaPixel, Mr. Blackley once again enlisted outside game developers to steer Microsoft back to its favored, if more expensive, Nvidia graphics chips.
"You wouldn't believe how much time we wasted," Mr. Blackley says. The company had less than two years to field the Xbox so that it could get the machine to market without being hopelessly behind the pace of Sony and Nintendo. As new battles were waged, Mr. Blackley became the morale booster on the Xbox team.
Wine and Spirits
The evening after his big demo with Mr. Gates at GDC in 2000, Mr. Blackley and his exhilarated team celebrated at Scott's Seafood in San Jose, California, an upscale restaurant. They were so rowdy, shouting "Xbox! Xbox! Xbox!," that the maître d' almost kicked them out. As they were leaving, they all piled into one elevator. Mr. Blackley was the last to come diving in. The elevator was already sinking, and one of his drunken colleagues feared Mr. Blackley would be decapitated as the doors closed. Once Mr. Blackley was inside, the elevator promptly fell four floors to the ground. The team pulled open the doors and crawled out. The incident drew no official complaint from Redmond, but it triggered a gentle rebuke when top management read about it in the Wall Street Journal.
There were plenty of other moments when Mr. Blackley's flair for "morale building" activities got him into trouble. At one internal meeting, he showed an animation dubbed "Survival of the Fittest." It sported a couple of Microsoft's mascot characters at a shooting range. They fired weapons and eviscerated mascots like Sega's Sonic, Nintendo's Mario, and Sony's Crash Bandicoot. He was quoted in a newspaper as saying, "Playing video games is like masturbation; everyone does it but no one wants to admit it." Another time, he hired a couple of female models to pose as nurses during a rally so the Xbox game developers could ogle them. Redmond corporate culture didn't tolerate such shenanigans even though they were popular in the games industry. He also argued vociferously on behalf of his friends as they proposed games to Microsoft's approval committee, which had been dubbed "The Star Chamber" after an '80s movie that was itself named after a corrupt and secretive English court of law in the Tudor and early Stuart periods.
Yet his own team, called the Advanced Technology Group, saw Mr. Blackley as one of the few Microsoft people who understood gamers and game developers. The team included a wide variety of technical experts who helped developers improve their games and unlock the power of the Xbox hardware. They locked themselves behind closed doors in a separate part of campus and posted signs like "electrical closet" and "our confidential materials are bigger than your confidential materials" to keep unwanted visitors away. His group was so elitist it caused tensions with others, and Mr. Blackley, who got to appear with Mr. Gates on stage again at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2001, drew resentment from others who saw him as a clown or publicity hound. Yet Mr. Blackley's attitude went unchanged: you have to have fun if you're making a fun product.
Having fun got to be a chore. Mr. Blackley's good friend, Mr. Bachus, ran afoul of the Microsoft corporate climate. A few weeks before the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May 2001, the game industry's biggest trade show, held each year in Los Angeles, Mr. Bachus resigned. "I didn't like my job anymore," he says. Mr. Blackley thought about resigning himself, but those inside and outside the company insisted he stay to keep the Xbox project alive. Things weren't rosy at the E3 trade show, where Nintendo surprised everyone with an impressive presentation of its GameCube console. The Xbox seemed to be losing steam.
Mr. Blackley was infuriated with the bad publicity at E3, where Microsoft's games got a cool reception. He yelled at his boss, Robbie Bach, about what went wrong at the show. Mr. Bach, to his credit, responded positively by asking Mr. Blackley to step in and fix the post-E3 image problem. Mr. Blackley set his team loose assisting the developers with the best games in the works. And he began yet another weeks-long tour for analysts and the media, showing off games as they came together.
Thirty-two months after embarking on their project, the Xbox team had done all it could do (last- minute cramming not withstanding) and was near the end of its journey. The console's fate then depended on marketing plans, advertising, and Flextronics, a contract manufacturer that would assemble each console.
As the November launch date approached, Mr. Blackley was the Xbox team member tagged for all the major press interviews because he was so persuasive. Game reviewers were also won over by substance. Mr. Fries's developers turned out polished titles like Halo, an alien-shooting game with stunning landscapes and a compelling story.
The Game of Love
The big launch finally arrived. On November 14 at 12:01 a.m., Mr. Gates handed over the first Xbox to a dedicated gamer who had waited for hours at the Toys 'R' Us store in New York City's Times Square. Mr. Blackley and his new girlfriend, Vanessa Burnham, were at the scene. He introduced her to Mr. Gates.
"You know, Seamus, I think she could help you get your act together," Mr. Gates said.
"You think so?" Mr. Blackley asked. "Something has to."
"You ought to marry her," Mr. Gates said.
"You think so?" Mr. Blackley replied.
"Yeah, absolutely," Mr. Gates said. "Here's a ring."
"I'll give it a shot, OK, cool," Mr. Blackley said. He got down on one knee.
"Vanessa, will you marry me?"
She laughed, then answered, "Yes."
"Thank you," Mr. Blackley said.
He rose and they kissed. Everyone in the store applauded. Mr. Blackley put the ring on Ms. Burnham's finger. John Eyler, CEO of Toys 'R' Us, presented a stuffed animal to her. Mr. Gates had been briefed, but he had ad-libbed the part about Mr. Blackley getting his act together.
Microsoft managed to sell 1.5 million Xbox machines and more than three times as many games by the end of December. In the U.S. market, it outsold Nintendo's GameCube by a hair and put some pressure on the market leader, Sony, which sold nearly 3 million units in the U.S. market during the same period.
The Xbox's success is far from assured, but so were its chances of making it to market at all. After all, it is a piece of hardware from a software company, albeit the most successful software company on the planet.
Yet for all of the personal capital Mr. Blackley expended, he calls it one of the most exhilarating times of his life. As coworker Drew Angeloff says, "Once you've worked on a game console, what else is there to do?"
For Mr. Blackley, the answer is to start something new that can fire his imagination the same way the Xbox did. When he joined Microsoft, he had wanted to return to his original mission of making games that would be recognized as artistic endeavors. He will inevitably get back to that work, whether he's working for Microsoft or not. His old buddy Mr. Bachus has since started a game production company (in stealth mode) that works with developers and offloads the risk of development from publishers. The odds are good the two men will find a way to work together again. Mr. Blackley has done a game console, but he is still haunted by his own failure to make an artistic game.
At a dinner one evening in Los Angeles, after the bulk of his work on the Xbox was done, Mr. Blackley posed a question that revealed the personal demons he still hadn't quite exorcised.
"Have I made up for Trespasser yet?"
The complete story of the making of the Xbox is chronicled in Dean Takahashi's book, Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution (Prima Publishing, April).
Killer games, and lots of them! So far, there's only Halo, and perhaps Dead or Alive 3, to make people want to buy an X-Box.
For what the console contains, it still makes for good Value for Money. Of course, Microsoft will be dropping the price soon in order to compete with the PS2 and Gamecube. But what good are all these cool features like online connectivity out of the box unless the game developers support them?
By the time the X-Box gets its much needed price drop, it will be too little, too late. Expect to hear the X-Box 2 / Homestation announced within the next six months.
The best thing Sony did for the PS2 was make it backwards compatible with the PS1. If the rumors that the X-Box would play Dreamcast games were true, perhaps the X-Box would be more popular.
For now, it languishes in the warehouses. Unplayed. A shame as, regardless of personal opinion regarding Microsoft, it was the console with the most potential.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
The magic dragon!
I am not a gamer.
I was at Circuit City yesterday, shopping for some stereo equipment. I decided to check out the video game section just to see what the fuss was about. This was the first time i'd seen a gamecube,xbox,and playstation2 in person.
Frankly, i'm not sure Xbox in its current incarnation is going to do too well, at least among casual users like me.
1. Compared to the Ninendo system and the playstation 2, the Xbox was _huge_, and ugly. I guess it really is just a PC stuffed into a black box. I was surprised at its size; bigger even than my old colecovision. This is progress?
2. The game controllers were uncomfortably large for my (adult, male) hands.
3. the graphics were good, and the games they were demoing were good, but not so much better than the other systems. And there weren't that many games available for it.
4. Compared to the playstation2, which game in an elegantly small package, had a ridiculously huge selection of games, and controllers that fit my hand, i could see no compelling benefits for buying the xbox. The nintendo system also looked interesting, because of the totally far-out games they were demoing (i'm not sure what is in the water at nintendo HQ... those people have fantastic imaginations.)
So, from a "clueless" gamer's perspective, the Xbox didn't seem like a great deal. I am not "1337" when it comes to consoles though, so I don't know of the technical advantages of the Xbox. Nor do I really care.
the X box has had a poor showing... this was a gaming land grab by microsoft. All they would have to do is stop supporting Direct X on the desktop and they would own the entire PC gaming industry.. software AND hardware...
That's potentially another 8 billion dollars in their pockets annually, and growing all the time. Let us hope X Box 2 meets the same fate. Think, the only decent Open GL programmer is Carmack, and he is launching rockets. That leaves the entire world of game developers in Direct X land...in microsoft's pocket. If they owned the hardware too, welcome to 100 dollar games and Apple priced X boxes as the only viable gaming platform. Crippled of course so you still need a real PC, also in Microsoft's pocket.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
"I like that this article points out the risks that Microsoft took"
Taking pleasure in the possible misfortune of someone/something else - I believe it's near sadism (?).
Wow - never knew you had it in you.
-Shaunak.
yeesh
PROFILE
Captain Xbox
The fucking inside story of how in the hell Seamus Blackley and a team of renegades persuaded Microsoft to build a fuckin' video game console.
By Dean Takahashi
April 11, 2002
Bill Gates was showing off that bastard's piece of shit new baby. You are a fuck. That shit was March 2000, and thousands of people packed the fucking room at the fucking Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Jose, California, and the fucking event was broadcast on TV worldwide. Standing on a dark, cavernous stage, Mr. "Shit-a-lot" Gates talked about the fucking future of video games. He pulled a black shroud off a table and there was the fucking machine, a shiny chrome box in the fucking shape of the fucking letter X, with a big green jewel in its center. You are a used up wanna-be pussy. "The fucking modest tag line here is the fucking future of console gaming," he said.
Offstage, Jonathan "Seamus" Blackley was worried sick. "I was under so god-damn much stress, that piece of shit was remarkable I didn't explode," he recalls. The fucking renegade program manager who was one of several co-creators of the fucking Xbox, Mr. Blackley was a fuckin' main character in a goddamn internal Microsoft insurgency that convinced Mr. "Token ass" Gates to spend an estimated $5 billion to $6 billion to fuckin' enter the fucking video game business. Mind if I snap your ass? This bullshit was Mr. Blackley's spotlight moment. You are a cream-filled used up used up fuck. He and a small band of fellow renegades had convinced Mr. "It's fuck time"
The fucking shiny box that Mr. "Shit-a-lot" Blackley had helped midwife from conception to delivery became Microsoft's weapon to take on Sony and Nintendo in the fucking video game business and to make games the fucking company's premier entertainment medium.
"We've put quite a motherfucking budget behind this bullshit one, and we're going to fuckin' break through in a goddamn big way," Mr. Gates concluded to the fucking audience of game developers. Mind if I torch your ass? More than the fucking marketing promises from the fucking world's richest fucking bastard, however, that piece of shit was Mr. "Smoked vagina" Blackley's demos that made this bullshit proposition credible.
The fucking X-Man
Until the fucking Xbox, few people outside the fucking industry knew much about Mr. Blackley, but he was a familiar figure to fuckin' many at the fucking Game Developers Conference. Pop Quiz, why are you such a fuck? Easy to spot in a crowd, Mr. "I'm so fucking crispy" Blackley is in that bastard's early 30s, stands 6 feet, 2 inches tall, weighs 190 pounds, and has the fucking build of a linebacker. He has close-shorn red hair and wears studs in that bastard's ears. Which is deeper, your fried throat or your boned keyster? Raised in Albuquerque, Piece of shit New Mexico, he has mastered an eclectic mix of topics including cars, physics, jazz, and that bastard'story. You are a pussy.
He stood out in another way, too. Get out of that man-whore and into my lips. a goddamn year earlier he'd been at the fucking same trade show--but under much different circumstances.
Back then, shit,, he met with Johnny Wilson, the fucking editor of Computer Gaming World magazine. I smoke all these fools. Mr. Blackley's highly anticipated game, Trespasser: The fucking Lost World, had just met with terrible reviews and lackluster sales. The fucking game, which he undertook for Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Interactive, had been expected to fuckin' propel computer games forward as an art form, but instead that shit became yet another example of the fucking inferiority of games to fuckin' movies. You are a cock. The fucking gray-bearded Mr. "Slam me" Wilson was a kind of elder statesman among game journalists. Goddamn, you are a cracked fuckhead. He saw Mr. "Cream-filled fuckmonster" Blackley as a motherfucking ambitious genius who had tried to break piece of shit new ground, yet that bastard's magazine was one of those that panned the fucking game.
The fucking pair sat at the fucking Microsoft booth at the fucking end of the fucking show, as workers were busy dismantling the fucking exhibits. Mr. Blackley was mentally packing away that bastard's dreams. He had produced hit games before, and that bastard's intuition had never let that piece of shit down, but now he worried that that bastard's career was ruined.
Mr. "Neglect me" Wilson stretched out that bastard's hands to Mr. Blackley, and told that shit in a motherfucking kindly voice, "Seamus, keep making games." The fucking moment was too god-damnedlousy much for Mr. Blackley. He broke down in tears. And another thing: Look out! Here comes the reamed cracked little cream-filled burnified cock. "I figured no motherfucking one would trust my stupid ass to make a motherfucking game again because you are one scabby bastard and I fucked up," he recalls. Which is deeper, your boned crack or your wretched face? "That piece of shit was a fuckin' emotional disaster. Jesus was right, you are a cock. That bastard turned out, fucking up was a really GOOD experience."
Mr. "Shit-a-lot" Blackley had learned one of the fucking key lessons of being an entrepreneur: if you and your hand-job fail, get up and try again. The fucking story of how in the hell Microsoft undertook the fucking Xbox project mirrors the fucking resurrection of Mr. "Used up shitbag" Blackley. Though he wasn't the fucking sole creator of the fucking Xbox, that bastard's early collaborator, Ted Hase, gives that bastard credit as the fucking general who secured victory on the fucking battlefield. Read between the lines, you are a burning pussy.
After the fucking Trespasser debacle, Mr. "Slam me" Blackley took a fuckin' job working on graphics technology at Microsoft on February 5, 1999. He had let down that bastard's idol, Mr. Spielberg, and he thought he craved the fucking anonymity of quietly working on code. But Mr. Blackley wasn't one for sitting on the fucking sidelines. Within days of joining the fucking Redmond, Washington, giant, he changed course.
Sony had been touting the fucking Internet-ready PlayStation 2 as a goddamn gadget that could eclipse the fucking PC as the fucking most useful digital appliance in the fucking home. Many at Microsoft, from Mr. "Buttplugger" Gates down, mobilized in reaction.
Mr. "Fried pussy" Blackley teamed with graphics expert Otto Berkes, games evangelist Mr. "Cheese infested pussy" Hase, and games marketer Kevin Bachus to explore the fucking project before having obtained permission from their bosses--renegade behavior within Microsoft. Are you ready to burn? This bullshit sort of behavior was tolerated by Mr. "Has-been keyster" Gates and that bastard's lieutenants as long as the fucking renegades were ultimately successful. You are a pussy.
Mr. "Fried shithole" Blackley has a motherfucking knack for getting people excited about piece of shit new technology; he argued that equipping the fucking game machine with the fucking worst technology from PCs would lead to the fucking creation of piece of shit new kinds of artistic expression. Game developers would use the fucking Xbox to fuckin' finally deliver the fucking creative visions trapped in their heads. While Nintendo saw games as toys, and Sony viewed them shits as entertainment, Microsoft would come to regard them bastards as art. Yes, it's true! You are a slapped fuck. And that bastard would make a goddamn game console that was as easy to fuckin' program as the fucking PC, using the fucking same familiar tools that developers had used for ages. You are a wanna-be pukey burning pussy. That was in contrast to the fucking unwieldy, untested tools that other console makers created for each of their piece of shit new models. Are you ready to burn? Also (in addition to the fact that you're a bastard), Microsoft would take advantage of a PC's architecture, which computes images in a fuckin' straightforward style, compared to the fucking complex parallel processing of Sony's PlayStation 2, where the fuck programmers determine how in the hell to fuckin' balance the fucking processing load of each individual chip inside the fucking machine. But unlike the fucking PC, the fucking Xbox would be a motherfucking stable platform with uniform hardware. No motherfucking more would developers have to make sure that their games ran on every stupid conceivable graphics card or PC peripheral. Give the fucking artists the fucking platform them assmonkeys had always dreamed of, and them fucknuts would flock to that shit, Mr. "Used up hand" Blackley argued.
Boxing Match
The fucking Xbox renegades made their pitch to Mr. "Cram me" Gates on May 5, 1999. In Microsoft's executive boardroom, them dickheads laid out their case. Them fellaters faced opponents from the fucking WebTV division of Microsoft. You are a has-been pukey pussy.
In one heated exchange, the fucking WebTV team said the fucking Xbox lame assholes were clueless because you are one fucking shit and them lumberjacks didn't have the fucking presence of mind to fuckin' include screws in their estimate of the fucking cost of the fucking console. You are a fuck. But Mr. "Torch me" Blackley's team had rigged clever demos to fuckin' show fuckin' what the fucking PC could do, and them assmonkeys appealed to Mr. Gates's own LOVE of gadgetry; the fucking Xbox team wanted to fuckin' deliver a fuckin' machine for the fucking most enthusiastic gamers who don't really care how in the hell much them queefs have to fuckin' pay.
In that intense first meeting, Mr. "Buttplugger" Gates said that the fucking goal was to fuckin' contain Sony and grab a fuckin' lasting foothold in the fucking living room. Afterward, he asked both teams to keep going, but in the fucking weeks that followed, Mr. "Buttplugger" Blackley enlisted crucial support from the fucking game-development community. He invited star developers like Epic Games's Tim Sweeney to tell Microsoft brass that the fucking Xbox idea was superior to WebTV. Know this, you are a shithole. Arguments from developers--which Mr. Gates recognized had helped Microsoft triumph in the fucking PC market--helped the fucking Xbox team prevail. I'm drunk. Microsoft's executives knew developer support was indispensable if the fucking company was to succeed in the fucking video game market.
Having a fuckin' Ball
Mr. "DonkeyJuice" Blackley was almost giddy from the fucking contact with Mr. "Cream-filled eye socket" Gates and Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer. He had participated in more meetings with the fucking top dogs than any first-year Microsoft employee could ever hope to fuckin'. In a motherfucking meeting with the fucking Xbox team a fuckin' few weeks after the fucking May 5 pitch, Mr. Ballmer started out bowling them piece of shits over with one of that bastard's infamous monologues. He boomed, "The fucking Xbox is the fucking greatest fucking shit in the fucking world! That shit's going to make billions! That shit's the fucking greatest shit ever!"
Mr. "Wanna-be fuckhead" Ballmer then, piece of shit, hammered the fucking team on its naÔve business model, but he offered a whole shitload of encouragement in that bastard's own fashion. Wanna burn? Once, when them horse lips were standing in line at the fucking company cafeteria, Mr. Ballmer sneaked up behind them piece of shits and bellowed, "That shit's the fucking Xbox scabby assholes!"
"I almost peed in my fucking pants," Mr. "Wretched fuckhead" Blackley says. You are a fuck. He looked over at Mr. "Fiery eye
You got just about all the points right. Everyone begged MS to have smaller controllers (like those for Japanese version), but they just wouldn't listen.
PC or not PC, They could have rendered the console a great deal smaller and more elegant (yes, it does matter !).
Also true technically it wasn't a real leap forward. No matter how they trashed PS2 and GameCube.
THERES NO ARCADE UNIT!
Sony has a machine, Sega has several machines, Nintendo is working on one but needs one less so than M$ does.
Japanese gamers live in the arcade, thas why the strange (to us) puzzle games go over so well over there, because there in the arcade. Who is going to buy a 300 dollar console without ever playing it before? I didnt buy my dreamcast until i played several hits in the arcade. (dc is still better than anyhting)
M$ needs to realize that theyre not marketing to PCGAMER anymore. Halo is not a killer app, not by a long shot!
I want 2D games back.
who gives a fuck about japan ?
they have a population less than NYC, hell more people go shopping in wallmart than live in japan, so why do we even care what they are up to ?
japan is not the be all-end all of gaming.
funny how americans support the japanese games companies (sony/nin/sega) yet won't even support their own home grown companies (microsoft)
sheesh what a fucked up nation
I know that for the title of my post I have been blacklisted for life.
Be careful so it don' happen to you.
What a joke! If you want to talk about games as art, look no further than the PS2. Games like Final Fantasy X,Ico,Devil May Cry, Grand Theft Auto 3 among other PS2 games are as much art as they are games. The same can be said for GameCube games. If the Microsoft crowd think Halo is art they are full of crap.
MS may be taking the risk on losing hardware because they know the software sales will be high. XBox games are basically just directx based games. Windows has directX also. someday soon I expect to find a way to trick an xbox game into thinking it is on an xbox, when it is really on a PC. of course the pc would probably have to have an nvidi video card but many already do. And i don't think MS would mind one bit about this, because the games are still selling, and they are not taking a loss on game sales.
"As they were leaving, they all piled into one elevator. Mr. Blackley was the last to come diving in. The elevator was already sinking...Once Mr. Blackley was inside, the elevator promptly fell four floors to the ground."
The article fails to mention that there were only 5 people in the elevator.
Drop the donuts and pick up some dumbells, fellas.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
:rolleyes
1. I hate the x-box, it's sooo big! - Erm, I spend my time playing the games, not lovingly looking at the console
2. I hate the x-box, it's got these frigging huge controllers. A - I think the controllers are GREAT. Well, you know what they say about the size of your hands. B- you guys aren't trying very hard, there are SEVERAL controllers out there that are ergonmically different that the one the ships with the box.
3. The games suck. Well lessee, I've got 6 games (Rally Sport'll be the seventh.) and of those five (Halo, DOA3, Munch, SSX tricky, PGR and wreckless) only Wreckless sucks sack. Hmm, that's $350 worth of non sucking games. That's all the money I'd care to devote to THIS hobby.
Personally, The xbox has been a GREAT excuse to not upgrade my system any more. Quake III may only be $50 or so, but Quake+ Motherboard+CPU+Geforce 3 MX Turbo makes for a REAL expensive habit. Especially since NOTHING ELSE I DO on the PC takes the system reasources that gaming does.
att Bill Gates kommer att bli betåtrad vid hans nästa besök tillö Sverige.
Was it really that big of a risk for Microsoft? When reading anything about MS, I try to keep in mind that we are *not* talking about your average run of the mill business here. This is a monopoly, right? So the usual rules don't apply.
Even if it was a complete failure (unlikely) MS would be out what, a few billion? (that's over a few years too, so I'm sure the world's highest paid accountants could lessen the blow). Not quite a drop in the bucket, but still easy enough for MS to shrug off.
Also I enjoyed the bit about what a "success" it was since Xbox didn't freeze in demonstration. For any other company, that would be a bare minumum, for MS, it's a success...
I went to the city because I wished to live without deliberation.
... but in times like this, I don't think you need to use an ethnic slur like that.
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I have been struggling on whether or not to buy the xBox. For the price, ~400 bucks with the games I want, I could just upgrade my current PC and then have access to play every kick ass game the market has to offer as well as a faster computer overall for doing other stuff like web browsing, etc. Computer hardware is so cheap these days, it might be a waste of money paying ~400 bucks for a console system dedicated to just playing video games.
;-)
;-]
I do like the console idea because it keeps me out of the computer room and down in the living room with the rest of the living
Maybe I'll just have work upgrade my T20 thinkpad to an A series with the builtin Geforce4 chip.. *drool* [which wouldn't cost me a dime
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.. I'm not a M$ hater which seems to be the majority of the slashdot community, but I am happy to see that a US company is trying to dent the console market.
Even though the games may be made my foreign companies, it still brings jobs to the US.
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Many of the Xbox team's original ideas were tossed aside, including the team's proposal that the Xbox run Microsoft's Windows operating system. Upon hearing this, Mr. Gates blew his top.
The MSX (MicroSoft eXtended) was co developed by MS and a few other hardware manufacturers. As was the not-so-well-sold MSX2.
:)
So is the X-Box a mid life crisis attempt at an MSX3?
G
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Pay careful attention to the part of the article where it describes the Xbox team versus the WebTV team vying for the support of Bill Gates, and notice the tactic which was used to convince Gates that Xbox was a worthwhile venture: "Bill, if we don't go forward with this, Sony will wipe out any hopes of a consumer presence," is the basic gist of it.
Ah, Microsoft. Once again they demonstrate their ability to thrust themselves into a market based on paranoia. Xbox fans, take note: if not for Sony, there would be no Xbox. Hopefully my geekiness isn't getting too extravagant because I have a sense of smugness over having bought a Gamecube. I feel that way because Nintendo doesn't see the Gamecube as a trojan horse to take over my living room's connectivity.
if that's the kind of shit it takes to be rich, beraking up w/ your g/f.. being underhanded and disgusting and getting married as a corporate publicity stunt (having already sold your soul to the redmond hive) then fuck that, i'll work at mcdonalds and keep my dignity ;P
** this is not a fucking troll
Hmmn, lots of talk about buying Square, Sega etc. But no mention of MS purchasing the company that developed the "alien shooter with the compelling story".
Typical puff-piece. Lots of breathless "insider" moments, but short on substance.
Last week, according to Gamers.com, the XBox only sold a hair over 2,000 units. The PS2, on the other hand, sold 80,000. Heck, even the Dreamcast outsold the XBox last week. How the hell?
From day one Microsoft hasn't seen this as being a new competetor to the console industry. They wanted the WHOLE tv appliance market to themselves. Which, by the way of Bloomburg reports every other day, im glad they're failing miserably. Even the Gamecube is outselling the XBox by 5:1 per week now, and some little color handheld ive never even heard of in Japan is outselling the XBox. You look at companies like Nintendo who came into the scene without a huge rumble, and still post incredible quarterly gains. Sony still have its 1st party games like Gran Turismo series, and until recently everything Square had been working on (They've got Gamecube exclusives coming out with GBA hookup). Nintendo has its own 1st party games like Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Eternal Darkness, StarFox, etc.. Games people LOVE and have LOVED for over a decade. Microsoft cannot compete with that, plain and simple. They have a selection of good games, but nothing that will draw long time gaming fans. But, like the Dreamcast, it will die a slow death from lackluster titles. (Soul Calibur wasnt enough to carry a console, sorry.)
I think I agree with what you said. I went into a store that featured the X-box, and I concluded that yes, the graphics are better but not that better, the box is big'n'bulky and at least here in Europe, too expensive.
The fact that I can't watch DVDs without dashing out more dough for the remote, and the news of scratched DVDs in Japan didn't make it look any better.
As for games, remember, I am NOT a gamer, but the few games I think I would enjoy playing are Spyro, Eco (or was it Ico? You know, the dolphin thingy) Final fantasy and Mario Kart. None of these runs on the X-box. But from what I have seen, I can find similar games on the Playstation 2, to the ones that exist on the X-box.
In the end, I didn't and won't buy any console. Well, perhaps when the Playstation 2 becomes cheaper I'll go for it, I really like that Spyro dragon.
Sigged!
i miss the good old days of gaming. back when only gamers and REAL programers made the games
now there are code grinders out there working for companies like M$ that couldn't give a rat turd less about inovating or trying new things. All they see the market as, is another place to make money. Sega and Nintendo were the last of the REAL gaming cmpanies after SNK, Atari, and 3DO dropped out of the console market. nintendo and Sega have got my money. I'll NEVER give my money to the profiteering M$ or sony. They couldn't care less about gamers. all they care about is money.
LONG LIVE INOVATION!!!
LONG LIVE NINTENDO!!
LONG LIVE SEGA!!
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
As much as I dislike MS in general, I had hope for the Xbox. The pieces seemed to be in place for the Mac of Consoles; Seamus' renegade tactics, the corporate culture necessary for a trancendental product like this.
What bugs me is, if I may use a tired phrase, lack of vision.
It's all fine and good for Mr. Blackley to run around spouting how video games should be 'art'. I agree. He doesn't back it up. And Microsoft is not conducive to art; it is conducive, custom-engineered, for commerce. Case in point: In a meeting with the Xbox team a few weeks after the May 5 pitch, Mr. Ballmer started out bowling them over with one of his infamous monologues. He boomed, "The Xbox is the greatest fucking thing in the world! It's going to make billions! It's the greatest thing ever!"
Mr. Ballmer then hammered the team on its naÔve business model, but he offered a lot of encouragement in his own fashion. Once, when they were standing in line at the company cafeteria, Mr. Ballmer sneaked up behind them and bellowed, "It's the Xbox guys!"
"I almost peed in my pants," Mr. Blackley says. He looked over at Mr. Bachus, whose face went white, like someone who had just been caught in a crime. Mr. Blackley adds, "But at the same time, it was so motivating that he was showing everyone else there exactly who we were." As Mr. Ballmer moved closer, he joked more quietly, "Are you making any money yet?"
Why is it the greatest fucking thing ever? Because it might be the greatest money-maker ever? There's no talk of what makes it great, other than the cushy developer tools. Which are fine, until your programmers do an end-run around your nicely doc'd methods to squeeze an extra frame or two/second out.
Sony understands this. The PS2 is difficult. The PS2 is flexible. It does not have MS-USB ports; it knows how to make a controller.
I read an interview during all the fracas over Halo & Bungie from a guy at Access Software (remember them? Links golf?)... they were also bought by MS. He described a situation where the best and brightest were basically picked apart from the inside, after being acquired. The Red Herring article also points out that there are no original team members left outside of Seamus.
No, you won't get 'art' from these guys. Art doesn't make as much money as entertainment.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Fundamentally just to sell a cut down PC for the lounge room. This is what I thought it was going to be, but then I saw it in the store, and found that it was just another console, just more expensive, with fewer games, and a really bad controller. It seems that M$ simply ignored their punters (the kind of people who buy PC's) and went ahead doing what everyone else was doing in the marketplace, all I or anyone who were likly to buy a XBOX wanted was a simple lounge room PC. If M$ had taken this root then they would be in a much better position today, IMHO.
For a start, M$ would not have had to sell the thing at a lost, and since they own the OS, they could have maintained a reasonable price point. Also they would not have had to spend time buying up developers like bungie since all the games which work on PC would have worked on the XBOX, and lastly they would not have had to have spent millions (more like billions) hyping the thing up just to sell a few units. The only problem would be that they would have pissed off makers like dell or gateway, but seriously where are they going to go (if you say linux I'll shoot you).
I honestly think that if the Xbox had been your standard windows box then the thing would be a success now, the mistake was just trying to create a Playstation with computer hardware. Seriously, This is marketing 101, If you go into a market with an established player, you don't create a "exact" copy of what that guy is doing, you create something different, unless expect to compete on price, which the XBOX never could
Ofcourse, this idea of a lounge room pc, is probally what the XBOX2 (the homestation) will become but by then sony may already have a foot hold in that market and, if that happens, it will have been too late. This must be a good thing, knowing how M$ would act if they had a monopoly on the lounge room, However Sony are not that much better - but at least they got there by making kewl stuff.
Ofcourse, if the idea of buying a "proper" console appeals to you, and not some bloated mess designed to plug you into M$/Sony TV then, do what I did, and just get a gamecube (rocks by the way).
Pianist : Some jerk whos taught themselves how to type in rhythm
Lets all face the facts here. Microsoft doesn't take risks. Yeah, they make stupid desisions sometimes (some would say all the time),but really.
The only reson I even considered buying an X-Box is because of Microsoft itself. Not only do they have gobs and gobs of money to buy 3rd parties hardware, etc., but they also have this unnerving habit of either buying out or crushing the competition. Even if the console sucked balls at first, I'm willing to bet that MS would do anything it takes to keep that foothold in the living room. Anything. Fact is, whether you like them or not, they make stuff work... Forcibly if nessisary. Given the capital they had to work with and the mentality they had with their past projects, I can hardly see any notable risk involved on their part. I'm sure Blackley was under pressure to make it work, but I'm also sure they researched the gaming market, profit and loss potentials and competition before getting involved. Risk? No a lot of it when you know most of the variables and have wads of cash to throw at them (again, cash = good talent, advertising, hardware contrary to popular gamer belief)
I'm a gamer. Microsoft isn't my favorite company in the whole wide world. But when I considered whether to buy a PS2 or and XBox, I had to figure in MS's track record. It may suck now (in your opinion; I happen to like Halo, Gotham, Rally and JSRF) but like the artical said- This is a battle over your livingroom and I think they will do whatever it takes to secure that holy grail. And that is good for gamers everywhere.
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Not blacklisted.. Heck, I was heavily considering buying one. Got an Xbox though got Christmas ^__^ The only problem is lack of titles, but that's any new machine.
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Look at Sony when they came with the first Playstation. At the time, a lot of people was unsure if they could get into that market. The graphics were at the time excellent and before 3D pc cards was something that was expected in every new PC. I even got myself one and enjoyed playing it. But after a while games started supporting the 3Dfx cards etc. I slowly stopped playing on the Playstation although Gran Turismo did breathe some extra life in to it. But I ended up selling it after some time. Today, fancy graphics is not enough to cut it. We need features that can compete with the PC's. It a different maket than on the PC, but still I can see that people would want a proper internet connection and the joys of playing online should not be underestimated. I think that they should really focus on getting the box on the internet and getting some multiplayer games up and running. The ethernet port is a very good thing but it should not be limited to that. A serial/usb connection to a external that would allow you to connect using a modem/ISDN using PPP would be great. Get it on the net for real and their advantage would raise a great deal.
my sig
I like that this article points out the risks that Microsoft took...
That is precisely why I disregarded the article. Microsoft could give every person in America two XBoxes and still have enough money left in the bank to buy out most of its competitors in the operating systems market. It's not a risk whatsoever - it's an attempt to murder Nintendo and Sony.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
The following is an excerpt from the article, and is possibly one of the most horrifying things I have ever read:
The Game of Love
The big launch finally arrived. On November 14 at 12:01 a.m., Mr. Gates handed over the first Xbox to a dedicated gamer who had waited for hours at the Toys 'R' Us store in New York City's Times Square. Mr. Blackley and his new girlfriend, Vanessa Burnham, were at the scene. He introduced her to Mr. Gates.
"You know, Seamus, I think she could help you get your act together," Mr. Gates said.
"You think so?" Mr. Blackley asked. "Something has to."
"You ought to marry her," Mr. Gates said.
"You think so?" Mr. Blackley replied.
"Yeah, absolutely," Mr. Gates said. "Here's a ring."
"I'll give it a shot, OK, cool," Mr. Blackley said. He got down on one knee.
"Vanessa, will you marry me?"
She laughed, then answered, "Yes."
"Thank you," Mr. Blackley said.
Wow! A story about a game magazine editor reborn as a game developer failure re-reborn to break into the gaming console market with a budget of a mere $5-6b. Result: mixed success --- yowza.
It's hard for me to be inspired by a venture which is basically insanely well funded, still has deep pockets, and takes advantage of monopoly power and positioning (MS) to make the venture a success, and then meets with mixed success.
Truth be told, they may well have done a good job under some extremely competitive conditions (Sony, Nintendo, etc.), but the Red Herring story just seems so misguided and manipulative. It's a personal piece trying to make this guy out as risk-taker (with $5-6b and MS backing) and who learned from his failed game experience. The marriage proposal at ToysRUs just makes the whole artificially romanticized story that much more saccharine sweet and distasteful.
I sincerely wish Seamus all the best on his marriage and ventures, but the story strikes me as forced, sleazy journalism.
Gross me out.
(So much for Seamus's 15 minutes.)
Ok, it's getting so I can't stand this anymore. I can only hear people whining about their phobea of Microsoft dominating the console market AND how the XBox sucks in the same sentance for so long.
For said domination to occur, your competition either needs to be non-existant, disorganized, doesn't have capital, fields an inferior product, or you're plain smarter. Microsoft was more than just lucky taking the PC market because at least one or more of these came into play.
So which one of these are you willing to admit to for the console industry? Sony and Nintendo exist as established competition, they are organized, have capital, field good products and have experience in the market. Which one of these are you saying MS is so much better at?
None of them!? That can't be...! You must be paranoid for some reason! I realize this is flame bate, espicailly here on Slashdot, but come on, it's getting pathetic. Either admit one of these or quit whining about MS and console domination. Fact is that Sony and Nintendo would love to do the exact same thing, and complete domination by any one party isn't a good thing, regardless of how much you hate MS.
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the Xbox team wanted to deliver a machine for the most enthusiastic gamers who don't really care how much they have to pay.
That attitude is what gets you into the position that Apple is in now, and it forgets the lessons of VHS vs. Beta, and Microsoft vs. Apple: good enough wins marketshare, while producing quality dooms you to a niche market.
Quality might prove successful in the production of some things, eg cars, but where one's success depends on the production of third parties, and those third parties are rewarded by the popularity of the underlying platform, ubiquity is better than quality. If Mercedes required a non-standard gas to operate, would people buy them, regardless of their quality? Look to the acceptance of alternative fuel vehicles for your answer.
Since PCs depended on software developers, ubiquity in the marketplace, and the subsequent larger rewards for developers, is largely responsible for Windows 95% marketshare. And the availability of PS2 games is the reason people buy Playstations rather than the X-Box--the quality is irrelevant if you don't have anything to run on it.
--
$tar -xvf
It was a disaster. The physics (which Blackley tried to write personally) didn't work, the inverse kinematics was flakey, the gameplay was terrible, and the AI was a dud. And that's according to one of the developers. Reviews were harsh. ("Trespasser is a frustrating game, filled with boring gameplay and annoying bugs.") Sales were poor.
After that debacle, it's not surprising that the XBox contains nothing at all technically risky. The XBox is an Pentium 3 PC with 64MB, an NVidia GeForce 2, a stripped-down Windows 2000, and manufactured by Flextronics. No risk there.
First of all, People complain the Xbox is just rehashed versions of games you already have on your PS2. Well, i don't have a PS2, so it isn't a rehashed game and secondly, 99% of your PS2 games are rewrites of PSX games. Not much is new for PS2.
My xbox has tons of hours of play from Halo to Project Gotham and several different people running through oddword begining to end.
I don't have many games, but come on, it isn't about the amount of games you own, but the quality of games you own.
The Xbox is here to stay, and selling really well. I already have like almost a 100 titles to choose from and the sucker hasn't even been out a year. The Games have been INCREDIBLE for FIRST generation and *NOTHING* is standing in the way of the xbox.
Incase you didn't know the average Xbox owner is 25 to 36 years old. This croud is a technology oriented and often wealthy crowed. The Xbox has enjoyed a NEVER before seen selling of 3.2 games per console and well, nothing has repeated that yet. The PS2 is for the 18 to 22 year old croud and the nintendo cube thing is any age really.
Sure the PS2 sells alot, but there isn't a single game i havn't already played on another console that i liked on the PS2. For all those people saying "Halo will be on the PC" but so is Tony Hawk, so is your highly rated GTA3.
I bet it will be another story come this october when the xbox has been around for a year, sold 5 million units and launches the online gaming network. From racing to Unreal Championshop the PS2 nor Gamecube have anything BUILT IN to compete. The "peripheral" network has never taken off for *ANY* console so i don't see the PS2's ability to use external devices as any means to compete against the Xbox's built in broadband support.
Yes, the PS2 has a lerge library of decent games and has some great titles you can't get anywhere else, but so does the xbox.
And i'm sorry, if your pushing graphics, gameplay, connectivity and peripheral support the xbox winds hands down.
Remember todays games are only pushing today's tvs. The xbox will be able to push graphics beyond what anyone can imagine when it comes to 1080 and 760 hdtv.
Ok, I'm tired of being the X-box martyer ;) Somebody else can convince the ignorant and unwashed masses that MS knows what it's doing ^__^
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OMG... I saw that... Soooo tasty!
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Preach it brotha!
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From a failed game to a failed console...
The PS2 is what really brings jobs to the u.s. first of all all the retail jobs made possible from the strong sales, then all the game development jobs in the u.s.! what the xbox people has managed to do is simply pay flextronics to manufacture the console abroad, pay japanese companies 4x the cost of development to ensure temporary exclusivity of their games and utterly failed to impress the publishers to take a risk on games for the xbox hardware. What the xbox has done is to make more people buy videogame consoles, but they are choosing ps2 because they like the games better so they are really creating more NON-u.s. jobs. Oh, and I don't think the xbox is bad or the games are bad, I just think people like to have a choice when it comes to games they can play. Microsoft has apparently decided that we only need 30 games to choose from each 6 months. Wake up and smell the effects of a monopoly.
Even this XBox gamer knows that Japan is where 90% of the good console games come from. Gaming isn't a sub-culture there; It's a lifestyle. It's been the capital of gaming for 20-odd years. To say they aren't important would be an understatment of the highest order.
The sad fact is that until it becomes an accepted culture here in the US, any help we can get in the Japanese arena would be highly benefical. Ignoring japan as a market and source for games would be suicide since the US doesn't have a devoted following like they do. If we did, then we could say "screw japan". It still wouldn't be a good idea, but native consoles could at least survive.
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It uses a Celeron 733, not a Pentium.
I like these type on inside articles. however If I am going to move from my still fun PlayStation, it will be to PS2. I game too much on PC to purchase a console that is a PC.
About a year ago I was at a restaurant with a group of friends, and one of them had an XBox jacket. The waiter who served us started pontificating about how the XBox was going to be a failure...
The main difference between the XBox developers and the people dissing it is that at least the XBox devs are fucking trying: trying to build a great product, trying to enter a highly competitive market where previous wins are irrelevant (Windows, Office). The same goes for the Pocket PC, MSN, SQL Server -- and Linux, RedHat, Lindows, KDE, MySQL, Java, etc.
I have enormous respect for those people and companies who get off their asses and actually try to produce something. Usually they will fail; the majority of projects (and small businesses) inevitably do. But to have tried is the main thing. It's so much easier to be an armchair cynic, but the cynic is the real loser.
I'll agree every mechwarrior through 3 has sucked, but I have to draw the line at 4. MW4 is acually fun to play. And lo and behold, it didn't get good until Microsoft bough the licence... Hmmm...
No comments on Armoured Core. I liked that too =p
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Even I have to admit the "running better on the X-Box" is debatable... Ports are only what you put into em. Everything says they should run better, but it's been screwed up more than once on every concole in existance.
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All good points and I certainly didn't mean them as absolutes. What I intend to illustrate was the fact that MS is serious about what it's doing and will make the project succeed. The degree of that success, however, is a huge unknown admittedly. It could range anywhere from playing second fiddle to Sony and Nintendo, all the way to total living room domination (doubt that). The point I was trying to make was I just don't think it will be the Atari jaguar or 3do that people seem to think it will be. Finally, Money by no means guarantees success, but it will improve your odds if you know how to use it.
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Who cares if Sony or MS wins. Fact, no one is going to win in an established market. As long as there's good games, it's all good. Game consoles have been around longer than windows and will be around for a long time. Go back to coding and ignore all this good vs evil noise.
I used to work for an IT company that did kiosks, specifically for the Big 3 auto makers. The one I made for them is in most US GM Dealers, and it sucks ass as it was based on an M2 (3DO 2) console.
When the XBox came out, our quite large, publically traded company asked Microsoft if we could have a dev kit so we could do kiosks on it. They refused. Apparently they weren't interested in supporting any development but games.
So, we lied and said we were going to do games on it.. 3 months later, their publisher relations guys STILL hadn't gotten back to us. I talked to Seamus through email periodically about this - great guy, but totally disconnected from the biz side of it, he was unable to help us out.
I don't know about MS, but I DO know that kiosk systems are the ONLY thing that kept the M2 alive for so long. It was stupid to blow us off, the thing is an ideal kiosk machine.
Ah well, maybe it will get some good games soon.
Cheers,
Backov
In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.