[STATIC] NARRATOR: Video games are one
of the most powerful mediums ever created. This merger of imagination and technology has introduced a fundamental
evolution in human interaction. GAMER: Damnit! [LAUGHTER] NARRATOR: And now represents a culture of 2.4 billion gamers connected worldwide. -GAMER 1: Yes!
-GAMER 2: Move! NARRATOR:
But just 20 years ago, the console that kicked off the era of online
gaming in the living room... Oh my God! NARRATOR: Almost didn't exist. Do you ever want to make hardware? No, that's one thing
that we decided not to do. The idea that Microsoft
could ever create a game console -was seen as a bit of a joke.
-Microsoft? They wear khakis and they're boring
and they're Office and they're Windows. You might as well call it Nerd Box, right? I can't imagine how it could be better. NARRATOR:
A new console was seen as a risky bet. XBOX OWNER: There it is. NARRATOR:
At a company not accustomed to losing. KEVIN BACHUS: You're proposing taking
money away from Windows in order to fund some game system? That is an insane business to get into. It was fear, uncertainty, and doubt. SOLDIER CHARACTER:
We're gonna make it, aren't we sir? NARRATOR: This is the story
of how a passionate group of gamers forever changed
the course of a corporate titan. PETER MOORE: They saw the future. Broadband internet to the television set. TINA SUMMERFORD: Like, you can do that? And then Bill says, "We should do this,
we should let these guys do this." NARRATOR: And the journey
to get that controller into our hands. This thing is gonna be the most
badass thing you can imagine. GAMER: Fire at will! Think about the way you could
tell stories with that. No matter where you are in the world, we can all be part
of one bigger community. We need this,
this is like the hotline for us. We take it for granted now, but back
then this was like science fiction. We weren't sure how we were gonna do it. Xbox, watch tv. Oh God. Oh, hell no, Microsoft! Gamers are not gonna be
tolerant of any level of [BLEEP] at all. The risk here was enormous. You're always just one catastrophic
bug away from not making it. I remember thinking,
"Hey, maybe we're in over our heads." [CREATURE ROARS] NEWS ANCHOR 1: There's a new contender
in the video game wars. Xbox is going to be the future. Truly the future of video games. -Xbox.
-FEMALE: Taking over the living room. MALE: Limitless, connected
digital entertainment. You guys never understood. NEWS ANCHOR 3: The company is going
to face fierce competition. GAMER: Sniper! Nooo! N'GAI CROAL: It's a ticking time bomb. It makes me very nervous
to actually play this for you. NEWS ANCHOR 4:
Xbox, getting a major overhaul. A bold vision for the future of gaming. It's the Xboooooooooooox! [DRAMATIC MUSIC] [TYPING SOUND EFFECTS] Hello. I'm Bill Gates.
Chairman of Microsoft. In this video,
you're going to see the future. Microsoft first came up
with the Windows concept back in 1983. I'm going to show you real quickly
a couple highlights from the product. The graphics interface is
an integral part of this new generation, that take PCs much further
than they've gone before. When I came to Microsoft in 1987,
the average age was 27, and I was 27. We were an amazing young company with an amazing
young founder in Bill Gates. He knew business better
than anybody out there, and he also knew technology. He was able to synthesize things
that nobody else in the industry could. SHANNON LOFTIS:
It was incredibly fast moving. It was the kind of place
where people didn't hold back. For someone who just wanted
to really let loose and grow and learn, it was an amazing place. GUY WELCH: Bill Gates and the team
back then were the disruptors, which was exciting and palpable. We just thought of ourselves,
kinda like rebels, kinda, you know, where, where the big companies like IBM
were these huge companies, but we were this little
rebel group of hackers, you know, doing this cool work. BILL GATES: I'm very optimistic
about where we're going. But that really changed in '95. NEWS ANCHOR: Windows '95
has taken over computer stores. They were on line
in the middle of the night, personal computer users packed into stores
dying to get their hands on one. ED FRIES: When Windows '95
launched it was like a coming-out party for the whole company. Microsoft made a thing
that everybody in the world wanted. It was like air to me, it just was.
It existed and you needed it. Today's world, you can't make it
without a computer. It has thousands of programs
that some of us may need. I can run three or four applications
at the same time. Windows '95 is so easy,
even a talk show host can figure it out. JAY LENO: Oh! RICK THOMPSON: By the late '90s, Windows was dropping a billion dollars
to the bottom line every month. CROWD: ...3! ...2! ...1! STORE EMPLOYEE: No running! SEAMUS BLACKLEY:
It was the most profitable business in the history of the human race. I don't think there's ever been
anything remotely like it unless you count the Spaniards
going to the New World and like, literally hollowing out
a mountain made of silver. [CHEERS AND APPLAUSE] Microsoft, which has a business
relationship with NBC, is the most powerful engine
in the new age of computers, a giant cash machine, and it strongly disagrees
with the government. In the late '90s we were sort
of the bad guys, the Death Star. The perception of Microsoft,
I think generally, was not great. They were in the middle
of the Justice Department monopoly issues. We were the big gorilla
in the room on most subjects. And so people viewed us
as sort of the big, bad tech company. NARRATOR:
By 1999, 90 percent of computers worldwide used the Microsoft Windows
operating system. They were untouchable, without comparison, or viable rival. We'd been successful
in the operating system world, built a huge PC business, built Microsoft Office
into this big business, we were the tech behemoth. GUY WELCH: Windows overtook that industry
and transformed the world, but during that period, disruption
was coming from all sides. [CORPORATE MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: For decades, Sony had been
a Japanese electronics giant with a history of producing personal
and home entertainment hardware. And then, in 1994, Sony struck gold with the PlayStation... a gaming console
with unparalleled success. GEOFF KEIGHLEY:
The launch of PlayStation really thrust gaming into popular culture
in a big way. And Sony saw an opportunity for gaming
to be even bigger and touch entertainment. What Sony discovered was a console was really a Trojan Horse
to the living room. And once that device
got into the living room, it could be a multimedia
entertainment device. ED FRIES: Sony was putting
different things into the home. They're putting a hard disk
here in like a DVR, they're putting memory here,
they're putting a processor here. And if they could connect
all those things together, it would be a computer. A potentially
existential threat to Microsoft. Without further ado,
let me introduce to you, the next generation
of PlayStation technology. N'GAI CROAL:
Even before Sony launched PlayStation 2, they were just creating
this perception of inevitability. PlayStation 2 was the next big thing, and anything in its way
was going to get crushed. [PUNCHES LANDING] FIGHT ANNOUNCER: Finish him! They said our new PlayStation
is so powerful that it's gonna replace the PC. RICK THOMPSON:
Sony was showing a slide at trade shows and to our customers of a future home that was full of PlayStations
and didn't have any PCs in it. Which was like shooting cannonballs
over Microsoft headquarters. RICK THOMPSON: It was an incredibly
arrogant thing for them to do, but it was pointed, too, I mean,
that was a very serious threat. ROBBIE BACH: In the '90s, Microsoft
was a paranoid place, and when somebody said Sony's gonna
put a PC in the living room, that got everybody's attention. And if Sony was at the point
of locking down the living room, what was Microsoft going to do? NARRATOR: One possible answer was brewing
not from the top executive ranks, but from deep
within the Microsoft corporate structure. Four renegades
on the DirectX software team, who were working
on tech to help developers create games for Windows,
and who were united by a fervent belief that games were the future. I was leading the DirectX development team
with one of my colleagues on the marketing side
of DirectX, Ted Hase. You know the question
that we were starting to ask is, "Where was all this
graphics technology headed?" Windows had won
the desktop operating-system wars, [WINDOWS STARTUP SOUND] so we were starting to ask
where there could be threats or opportunities in the future. We quickly narrowed down to games and an all-encompassing
entertainment platform for the living room as being an opportunity for us. Otto had carefully built
a career at Microsoft, and he had already taken a risk, because Otto could have been
an important programmer in a legitimate Microsoft group
like Windows or Office. Instead, he chose
to be in this DirectX group, because he was passionate about graphics. Ted and I both had folks on our teams we felt could bring some additional
brainpower to the conversation, including Seamus Blackley... [SHERRY MCKENNA CHUCKLING] How do you describe Seamus?
He's a, he's just a piece of work. One of the most brilliant people
I've ever met. Besides being a physicist
and a really amazing mathematician, Seamus really embodied the heart
of what it meant to be a game developer. When I saw arcade games when I was little, when I saw Computer Space, my first idea was not,
"I wanna play this game for hours." My idea was,
"How can I make my own thing?" One of Ted's employees was Kevin Bachus, who had a financial
and market analysis background. Kevin's like a Vulcan
in the best possible way. His interface to the world
is entirely intellectual. That is correct. We had day jobs for DirectX, but a lot of our thinking was how
we could build brand-new technology that was single-mindedly focused
on making the very best games. SEAMUS BLACKLEY: The four of us,
we played games, and we loved games, and we wanted to make them. That really meant something for us. NARRATOR: They were working
on DirectX, a set of software tools that standardized game development across PC hardware, and which was readily embraced by PC game developers. But the team saw a way
to push DirectX further, with an idea that could revolutionize the foundation
of console game development. With Windows and DirectX,
we have the platform that everybody wants to do
the work on to make the games. We already have the entire infrastructure
of everything you need to create all this technology
sitting on our platform. If we could only create
a single hardware standard, a box designed just to run DirectX. It gave us the idea
that we could produce better games than Sony and Nintendo and Sega. At that time Japanese game consoles
had very proprietary chipsets and they just didn't work very well
for, you know, Western developers. The instructions on how to use
it would be in Japanese. What the DirectX group was proposing was,
there's a better way to do this. We're gonna use PC architecture
that you're familiar with, which is just gonna work out of the gate, so they can spend more time
crafting and building their games. SHANNON LOFTIS: They had
an incredibly developer-friendly story, you already know how to write these games
if you've written them for PC, you can write them for console as well. You know, that message is pretty powerful. [YELL AND CRASHING] For us, this was
about advancing the gamers' interest and the game developers' interest,
which would advance Microsoft's interests. So we decided that this was the right time to try to build support for the idea
of Microsoft building a game console. At the same time, nobody ever believed that Microsoft would actually have
the audacity to attempt such a thing. OTTO BERKES: The four of us, we were on a
journey to get support for this crazy idea around putting a DirectX-powered box
in the living room to deliver interactive content. We were trying to crash meetings
and get traction on this thing. We were an annoyance. Nobody knows who the hell we are. And we were constantly discovering super
important people who were roadblocks, or who wouldn't get it,
and who didn't think games were important. KEVIN BACHUS: You're proposing taking
money away from Office development in order to fund some game system? These people dreaded
having meetings with us. OTTO BERKES: No surprise, displacing
the stated direction of a company at the scale of Microsoft
was not a trivial undertaking. KEVIN BACHUS: Realizing that
who you knew inside of Microsoft was at least as important
as what you knew, we brought in the guy
who could try to build support for the idea of Microsoft
building our game console. Nat Brown. I had a lot of time spent talking
with different teams and working with kind
of long-term strategic planning. OTTO BERKES: Nat had an incredible network
of connections. He opened up a lot of doors for us. KEVIN BACHUS:
Nat was sort of like our Obi-Wan Kenobi. This wizard figure who would show up
and go, "Oh, I know who you need to call. You need to talk to the guys
in this division or that division." He knew the structure to Microsoft. It's been nothing but a fight
to figure out how the place works. KEVIN BACHUS: One of the first things Nat
said was we needed a proper code name. NAT BROWN: Something
that would plant in peoples' head and take on a life of its own. Nat said, "Well, isn't it really
a DirectX box in the living room?" I'm like, "Yeah, it's like a DirectX box.
That's what it's about." NAT BROWN: And we just put up on the
board, let's call it the DirectX box. And so we had this awkward thing
in our mouths all the time. It was a DirectX box. And I remember saying,
"That's too long. It's just Xbox." And we liked that. KEVIN BACHUS: That was our codename, as a stand-in, until we had
something better come along. NAT BROWN: We built a business case that
showed how big this business could be. To get buy-in on that
you have to distribute it, you have to go socialize it. My trick was getting our stuff
in front of executives to make them say,
"I want to understand this business." NARRATOR: The team set their sights
on a logical choice, a senior executive who spoke
their language...literally. Yeah I'll play real quick. Ed Fries was a Microsoft lifer,
he joined as an intern. PHIL SPENCER: Ed had been critical
in the development of Office, one of the biggest franchises
even at that time that Microsoft ever had. DEAN TAKAHASHI: He had this passion
for games, he loved games, he programmed a game at a very early age. NARRATOR: When most high schoolers were getting their first
minimum-wage jobs, Fries was already cashing royalty checks
from his first game. So let's take a look
at this high-quality product. NARRATOR: A clone of the hit arcade game
Frogger, aptly named… Froggy. ED FRIES:
Highly original as you can see. Yeah! When I left Office to go run
the games group, people told me
I was committing career suicide. Thank you, that's it. Goodnight! They said, why would you leave Office, one of the most important parts
of the company, to go work on something
no one cares about? And when I got there, running the games
group, I found out they were right. No one cared about what I was doing.
And that was awesome! In '95, the games group was really small.
It was like 20 people. In a lot of these tech companies
there's not as much respect given for those other disciplines. BONNIE ROSS: Microsoft, at the time,
didn't care very much about games, I think we were just more of a hobby. KIKI WOLFKILL: We were gamers
working in like the bowels of some Microsoft corporate building. Our goal at the time was to push
Windows as a gaming platform. I always felt
like I was doing underdog stuff, and that's actually what I really enjoyed, I enjoyed trying to bring Microsoft
from behind in PC games. After Windows '95 launched,
we had to wear these t-shirts that said "Microsoft knows games." You know, it was obvious,
we didn't really know games, otherwise we wouldn't have had to put it
on our shirt, you know what I mean? ANNOUNCER: Choose your favorite form
of world domination in Age of Empires! But after a couple of years
we launched Age of Empires. It was kind of crazy,
what a fascination that game became. And it was one of the signature
PC strategy games for years. That was actually a huge success for us,
and we started to do some acquisitions, and we were growing
our publishing business. LAURA FRYER: As we started to ship more
quality games, we finally got to the point where we were respected in Microsoft,
and people were like, "Okay, Microsoft actually does know
what it's doing when it comes to games." SEAMUS BLACKLEY: Ed took
a broken games business and fixed it, and made it profitable,
and found a way to do it at Microsoft. These are difficult, double black belt,
aikido corporate moves. [RAPID PUNCH SOUND EFFECTS] NARRATOR:
Steering the tiny PC games division into a profitable department
had won Ed the trust of Bill Gates, and yet Fries himself wasn't satisfied. ED FRIES: Our PC market share
was growing into the teens, and at the same time we weren't doing
anything in the console space, and that to me
seemed like a bit of a waste, you know,
it was this huge market out there. One day, these guys from the DirectX team
walked into my office, and they pitched me
on this thing, the Xbox. And basically what they pitched
was a disguised PC. I thought, "Oh this is great. This is like a bridge for me
to get to the console business." PHIL SPENCER: This box that will run
a native version of DirectX, which is the part of Windows that's
really focused on the game developer, was revolutionary. It's gonna be easy to port
to this machine, easy to take my games and make them run, unlike
running on PlayStation at that time, or a Nintendo machine that were just
very alien hardware compared to a PC. SEAMUS BLACKLEY:
Ed understood all this game development that was happening on the PC,
we wanted to make a console that was specifically designed
to be easy and fun to make games on. And if the most creative people
did their best work on your platform, that's really good business,
that's a good idea. Basically I said, "You know I'm in.
I like this idea. I wanna help you guys." ALLISON STROLL: The DirectX team,
these were troublemakers, upstarts. They didn't have
these reputations that Ed had, as sort of born
and bred to work at Microsoft. They didn't really have
any political clout within the company. It was, I think, a big win for them to get me on their side
from my point of view. NARRATOR: This unlikely alliance
would bring the Xbox team closer to the biggest test of all,
pitching Bill Gates. And that opportunity would come
sooner than anyone expected. KEVIN BACHUS:
When Sony unveiled the PlayStation 2, they started talking about how they were
going to be the death of the PC. A new concept that we'd like to introduce
going into the next century, our EE, the Emotion Engine. It was like, what a great name.
Holy crap, you know, an Emotion Engine. Our new CPU architecture
significantly outperforms even the fastest Pentium III architecture
that's in the market today. They showed beautiful fighters,
models twirling around, they showed
a thousand delicate rose petals falling from the sky
to show just how many polygons, just the raw math that this behemoth
of a device could process. And guess what, it's got the power
of a thousand suns behind it! KEVIN BACHUS: For Microsoft, that really
crystalized what the stakes were. And Bill asked the DirectX team
to do an analysis of these claims that Sony had made. OTTO BERKES: As you can imagine, getting
on Bill's calendar was next to impossible. I felt a huge sense of pressure
to make things happen, and make them happen quickly. KEVIN BACHUS: Otto and Seamus provided
a fantastic breakdown, very technical, what the Emotion Engine
did and did not do, which claims were true,
which claims were exaggerated, and at the end, they very audaciously
slipped in a little mention of the fact that, you know,
we could build a console too, and we put together
what we thought at the time was a pretty compelling argument. NARRATOR: Gates had been curious about
the viability of a Microsoft console. But it wasn't until mid-March of 1999,
just one week after the formal announcement of the PS2,
that the possibility was finally starting to percolate
amongst the company's elite at its annual leadership retreat DEAN TAKAHASHI: Semiahmoo was
Bill Gates's annual think week, to think about, strategically, what sort of projects
did they want to greenlight. One of the programs that you do
at this three-day offsite is an idea-generating effort. We all sat in a room and people
could propose a topic for a breakout. RICK THOMPSON:
We would write down a question and we'd stand there
with our question in front of us. ROBBIE BACH: People moved around, and everybody voted
what topic they wanted to work on. RICK THOMPSON: And the question I wrote
that year was what if the cable companies, companies like AOL and Sony,
all got together and they all pooled all the subsidies that
they were paying to acquire customers. They could put out a box for free because it'd be so ubiquitous and so highly wanted, that's all I said. DEAN TAKAHASHI: If they could get it
into the home as a game console, it would be like the comet that hit
the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, meaning the Windows PC. RICK THOMPSON: I got a big line of people
behind me on that one, including Bill, and off we went to start talking
about it for a couple of hours. And so we had a sort of a two-hour thrash on pros and cons of a video game console,
what was the state of play with Sony. RICK THOMPSON: And coming out of there
Gates just called it. He wanted me to look
into what we should do about it. NARRATOR: Thompson's big question resonated with Gates, and
a call went out to the entire company looking for anyone who could answer. It was sort of an all-points bulletin
to senior managers all over the company saying, "Anybody working
on any of this kind of stuff?" And so, in March of '99, the DirectX team
and every other group in the company that touched games in any way, was brought together
for a meeting to talk about whether we should have a comprehensive
games strategy for the entire company. We took that opportunity to say, "Listen,
not only do we have a perspective on this, we actually have a presentation, a PowerPoint deck that we'd like to share
with everybody that says what we, the DirectX team,
think the company should do." And obviously that created a great stir
at the meeting, nobody was expecting that. But, it was
a great surprise to us to find out there were other parts of the company that
had aspirations of doing the same thing. [CORPORATE MUSIC PLAYING] I was running a team in what
was known as the Windows CE group. Windows CE was an operating system designed to run devices like
handheld computers or even game consoles, via a partnership we struck with Sega
around their last game console, which was the Dreamcast. We had a pretty capable hardware team. Some of the guys in that group
had worked at 3DO. ANNOUNCER:
Have you experienced the awesome power of the Panasonic REAL 3DO system? And that was a legitimate game console,
albeit one that, that was not a success in the marketplace,
but it was a legitimate console play. TED KUMMERT:
Together, we had the hardware expertise. And we had a proposal for what Microsoft
should do next in the console space. ANNOUNCER: Obviously! These guys think they know
how to make a game console and that they should do it
instead of us. We opened the door and Bill's
interested in a game console, so now they're going to edge us out and
they're going to step through the door. They were funded, they had a name,
they had leadership, they had, executive support. Their argument was,
we already know how to do this, what do these kids know, go with us. NARRATOR: The DirectX team was young and
hungry, full of tech know-how and vision. But Windows CE was
well known within the company, and had experience on their side. Suddenly it was a race to try to get
the most legitimacy inside of Microsoft, [CAR MOTORS ROARING] where the winner was going to be the one
to bring a game console to market. And it came to this big battle with Bill. It was what Microsoft often seemed to do, which is pit two groups
of smart people against each other. Classic Bill Gates move. NARRATOR:
The stage for the cage match was set. The DirectX and Windows CE teams would battle for the right
to make a Microsoft game console, in front of founder Bill Gates. To the victors belonged the spoils. Having Bill in the meeting
was always a fantastic thing as well as increasing
the tension at the same time. Somebody's confused.
Somebody's just not thinking. He was legendary. If you went in and you're full of [BLEEP],
you'd get shut down. BILL GATES: No, you don't understand. You didn't, you didn't,
you guys never understood, you never understood
the first thing about this. SEAMUS BLACKLEY: So, you know we tried
really hard not to be full of [BLEEP]. He's brilliant. But it was a very aggressive,
male-dominated culture. Lots of expletives. Super, super smart, but man if you said
something stupid, uh... I'm done. [FIGHT INTRO MUSIC] FIGHT ANNOUNCER: Round 1! TED KUMMERT:
From my group's perspective, we felt good. We thought they didn't really understand
the console space, so frankly we discounted them
a little bit. FIGHT ANNOUNCER: Ready? Fight! We proposed something that aligned
very much with how business was done in the game console market as it existed. You gotta meet the market where it's at. The Win CE guys were sort
of like preaching the model, but the model isn't very interesting. In their pitch to Bill
as we're sitting there horrified, they're basically talking
about recreating the 3DO, or making a game console similar
to everything else that's on the market. And we're like, "Ohhh…," you know? You don't enter a market and copy
what the competition does exactly. You enter a market to disrupt it.
To do stuff they can't do. Windows CE presented, and they talked
about this device, and blah blah blah, and then the DirectX team got up
and presented this vision for Xbox. There were two things in our plan that we thought absolutely critical
to the success of Xbox and games on Xbox, which had never been done before
on a game console. Number one, a hard drive,
that would be important not only to save information
about the player's state and what accomplishments they had done... FIGHT ANNOUNCER: Brutal! KEVIN BACHUS: but also so they could store
large amounts of data somewhere, and be able to access
and change that over time. I remember there was a big debate about
should there be a hard drive in it? Or not a hard drive in it? We were the not-hard-drive folks,
we didn't see the benefit of it. KEVIN BACHUS:
The second component that we thought was absolutely critical was Ethernet. The Sega Dreamcast was basically
the first console in history to have any kind of online
component to it, but theirs was dial-up internet
using a modem. That was the technology at the time. We realized that that was
a short-term solution. What we wanted to do was
to point towards the future and integrate Ethernet and high-speed
broadband internet to the television set. We wanted to bet on the future
rather than on the present. OTTO BERKES: The ability
to connect machines to each other and to the internet
was a core part of the DNA. TED KUMMERT: We were pitching
a very traditional game console and the Xbox team proposal
as I understood it, it sounded to us like,
"Hey, we're gonna take a PC, and then we're gonna go build
a console out of that," and it just didn't seem credible. It's just not the way the business worked. FIGHT ANNOUNCER: Final round. Fight! RICK THOMPSON: These two groups came
at the idea of building a game console in very, very different ways. So this meeting got really contentious. We'd have to watch these guys
like [BLEEP] on our plan and tell us it's not gonna work
and talk to Bill about how game consoles really work. I'm waiting, I'm like,
"Come on Bill, kill 'em. Shut 'em down. They're full of [BLEEP]."
And he doesn't do it! KEVIN BACHUS:
I wanted to see the Bill Gates of old. I wanted to see Old Testament Bill Gates. The guy that was famous
for throwing people out of meetings and telling them never
to come back and telling them that they're
the dumbest person in the company. To my horror,
Bill sat back and stroked his chin and was very thoughtful. Bill said "Well, I think both teams
raise some good ideas." But he didn't seem really that impressed. [CROWD CHEERING] NAT BROWN: In front of that audience we
realized we had to bring out every stop. The guys from the DirectX side knew
that you don't go to a Bill Gates review without showing something
really spectacular. And so leading into this meeting,
none of us had slept for like a week. SEAMUS BLACKLEY:
We made this little device that had relatively old PC technology with a game console-like case on it, and we modified Windows
with a hack that like tears open a hole from the bottom up
and exposes the hardware. OTTO BERKES: There was a bunch
of PC components and a game controller and, you know it was, literally just,
held together by chewing gum and tape. Soldering stuff, stripping wires and this was like, you know,
in the back of our car or like, you know, on the floor
in a conference room that we were making this stuff. An ugly timer on it that showed
Windows booting up from power. RICK THOMPSON: Booting a PC 20 years ago,
would take like three minutes. It could take longer,
it could take five, six, minutes. These guys played
with the PC, pulled stuff out that wasn't necessary, changed the BIOS. I turned it on and so it booted
in like three or four seconds. RICK THOMPSON:
Bill Gates almost jumped across the table, he was so excited when he saw that. And Bill immediately looks around... "Why the [BLEEP] doesn't Windows boot
like that all the time?" Yeah.
Bill wanted to see it multiple times. He's, like, "Turn it off and do it again.
Turn it off and do it again." I saw his jaw drop. This is a guy who knows
more than most people in the world will ever possibly know about PCs, saw a PC probably
for the first time come on immediately, and we had
a software emulator of a PlayStation that had been written for Windows. So you can imagine
the executives' surprise when we took a PlayStation disc,
stuck it in the Xbox prototype, and immediately Tomb Raider
came onscreen in all of its glory. OTTO BERKES:
It bridged the gap of believability. It made the idea of Xbox
seem tangible and real and achievable. The DirectX guys were stuntmen,
and they played the game a lot better. We, frankly, I think underestimated what they were gonna walk
into the room with. That meeting wasn't
a great outcome for us. SEAMUS BLACKLEY:
The Windows CE guys literally said, "It's not fair, we weren't given
the opportunity to make hardware." And somebody said... FIGHT ANNOUNCER: Eliminate him! "Well nobody told them
to build hardware, but they did." KEVIN BACHUS:
Unfortunately for the Windows CE team, they brought a PowerPoint to a demo fight. SEAMUS BLACKLEY: Looking back on it now,
I really do think that Bill looked at us and saw some aspect of himself,
or the early days of Microsoft, and that's what he thought
was going to work. NAT BROWN: Bill's reaction was,
you guys are proposing that it's doing good things for Windows, and it's based on Windows, and we get Windows in the living room, that all makes sense. You're proposing
that we spend 500 million dollars on it, you need to make
this presentation to Steve. How much do you think this advanced
operating environment is worth? Wait just one minute before you answer! OTTO BERKES: Steve is one of the most
enthusiastic and energetic people I have ever met in my life. That energy and enthusiasm
that you see on stage is 100% authentic. KEVIN BACHUS: At the time, if the biggest
fan of Xbox was Bill Gates, the biggest opponent was Steve Ballmer. OTTO BERKES: Steve, as a good businessman,
liked to make money. He liked, you know, big bold bets, but he liked big bold bets
that would pay off. NAT BROWN: This was right at the time
when Bill was transitioning the C.E.O. role to Steve. And they had already agreed
for a couple years that if Bill came up with some crazy idea that cost a lot of money
that Steve should get a chance to say yes or no on it first. And that led into this final meeting, where we really had quite a large group
of executives across the company. RICK THOMPSON: The room was packed, there were a lot
of different constituencies there, all the way from the field sales force, to the most technical side of the company. You had a lot of people
very, very interested. Steve's a big guy, and Bill's in there and you're in there
with these two super-famous guys who hold your destiny
and Steve is really upset that we wanted to take this risk. Ballmer understood very well
where Microsoft's bread was buttered and where the money came from. We were a company
known for productivity software. He didn't want some video game
or even the fact that we made video games, to threaten
the very lifeblood of the company. KEVIN BACHUS: Steve looked
at the Xbox idea and saw insanity. He went to his whiteboard,
he said, "OK, what's this gonna cost? What's the hard drive gonna cost?
What's the Ethernet port gonna cost? What's the graphics chip gonna cost?" And he totaled it all up and said
"There's no way you guy-- what's your reserve for returns?"
Reserve for returns? What does that mean? Well, we freely admitted
that we didn't understand the first thing about hardware, but we were gamers,
and we were game developers. Our entire careers
had been built around games. We knew that 3-D gaming was taking off, and online gaming
was just around the corner, and the best and brightest
in the game-development world, they were moving all their thinking
from the PC to consoles. We had the opportunity
to go create something that was going to take all of the equity, all the goodwill, all the technology
and all of the programming tools that had ever been created
to make Windows applications and carry it forward to the living room. And that was the product
that we were proposing, Xbox. GUY WELCH: Looking back at that moment,
what Steve and Bill were seeing was the future passing Microsoft by. You know Microsoft was thought of
as this dominant company of the era, but success or even survival
was anything but preordained. If Microsoft didn't grab this opportunity, that Microsoft would be on the wrong side
of the future of tech. It made everybody
step back a second and think. KEVIN BACHUS: The console business was
something that we needed to seize. I think that that was where
Bill and Steve realized they needed to move forward with Xbox. An incredibly electrifying moment. We'd finally convinced Steve,
Bill was convinced. They've done an outstanding job
so far, haven't they? PHIL SPENCER:
I think Bill did have a view that, software running on hardware
in a family room could really bring some unique
experiences into the home. We could start with video games but it could go
many directions from there. It was really an opportunity
to recapture the soul that Microsoft had at the beginning, to create that revolution,
to create that new platform. We were going to do something
no one else had done. We were going to launch a console
from a software company. Microsoft had done
nothing like that before. And then it became clear that there was
just some really big challenges for us. At the beginning it was about credibility. We had a task ahead of us to ensure that we were taken
seriously in the game industry. This equation of power,
performance, and price. You have to come correct
on every single part of that, you know, to be successful. There were so many tasks
that had to be done on both the hardware and software side. We realized that we needed
to have a leader. It was clear to all of us,
that that person was Rick Thompson. He had asked the best questions,
the most insightful questions. We wanted him to be part of the answers. So Rick was brought in
as the seasoned senior executive who had experience
in hardware with peripherals. Mice and keyboards. And he had to construct a plan
and a go-forward strategy. My comment at the time was
"I'm not big enough for this job." But, a couple days later, Steve Ballmer
calls me into his office and says, "Let's get this straight between
the two of us, this is your job now." OTTO BERKES: You're making a big splash,
you say you're getting into this consumer market,
you know, if that doesn't work out well, it could really give
the company a huge black eye and that would be
very difficult to recover from. The risk here is enormous, with the amount of money
we could lose on this project. And for me it was fear,
uncertainty, and doubt. Because you got a business guy who's gonna
try to figure out a business model with my little team of people
who helped me with the hardware business. You got four people
coming over from DirectX. None of us actually knew the rules
of the game that we were playing. And we basically just stood there
and looked at each other and said, "Oh [BLEEP]. Like, now what do we do?"
I was forwarded Episode 6 earlier and after scrubbing through it a little bit I'm astonished that Don Mattrick participated in this, as did Jack Tretton. Interesting to hear the folks tell their sides of the infamous story.
Edit: Robbie Bach has an uncanny resemblance to Will Forte
In the second episode, they talk about a lot of the names that the focus groups came up with for the original Xbox and one of them was "Norbo".
We really missed out.
Really excited to see how they cover how the original Xbox even came to be, although never explicitly stated, Microsoft did some work with Sega on the Dreamcast early on and you can definitely see a lot of that Dreamcast DNA in the original Xbox with it being so online focused and just a powerhouse specs wise for its gen (Splinter Cell, Doom 3 and Half Life 2 on the OG Xbox were insane), it's a shame that Halo 2 proved that Sega were on the money with the Dreamcast, but were just far too early for online to be adopted by most console gamers back then.
Also interested to see how they cover that shift from the train wreck that was the One's reveal to having Horizon 3 on PC with Xbox crossbuy just 3 years later, the whole Xbox brand shifted incredibly fast away from what Don Mattrick had originally planned, and for the absolute better.
Chapter 1: The Renegades: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJYsA1jXf60
Chapter 2: The Valentine's Day Massacre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT_i6hXf9WU
Chapter 3: And It Didn't Turn On: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yappZvmxcP8
Chapter 4: Cool…Now What?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC65DNzxyxU
Chapter 5: The Red Ring of Death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2d6IMBS8oY
Chapter 6: TV…Or Not TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1h--43R8Oo
One of the things that surprised me in this documentary is how they rejected Rockstar Games and their game GTA III
Watching through now. I know people wanted to see coverage of the red ring of death but I'm super curious how they'll talk about the entire XBone fuckup seeing as it's fairly recent in the company's history.
Edit: Briefly skipped to that bit and they actually got Don in. This'll be interesting.
Edit 2: Ha, didn't expect to see Video Games Awesome pop up in this. They're not that big but I've always had a soft spot for them.
Oddly specific question, but can anyone who watches through come back and answer if they go over the creation/ideation of using the logo in the middle of the controller as the UI for bringing up the operating system?
I’m interested in the software/UX side of that interaction more than the hardware, but any mention would be nice to get a note about if you think of it. It’ll be a while before I can sit down to watch myself.
Pretty cool to hear the story of the Microsoft CE team.
Had no idea there another team that worked with Sega trying to make a console.
EDIT: And they talk about trying to buy Nintendo, because they didn’t want to build the hardware, lol.
Been watching the xbox one part, there's of course a lot of PR going through it but I'm surprised at the ammount of transparency there, I dont see sony or nintendo doing something like this for their failures like the Vita or the Wii U anytime soon