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Kevin Bachus Talks About The Legacy Of The Original Xbox
>> From mercurynews.com:
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Here's a guest essay by Kevin Bachus, co-creator of the original Xbox and one of a handful of guys who got Microsoft serious about the console business.
When we came up with the notion to build a game console at Microsoft, the idea was considered by most people -- both inside and outside the company - to be preposterous. Go back and read the early articles and web postings. "Port-box," the die-hard gamers called it, certain that there would be no original, compelling games for the system that dared to take on Sony and Nintendo. And certainly we'd never get the huge Japanese game publishers' on board, they proclaimed. Indeed, most gamers who'd never even seen Xbox, but for whatever reason harbored fear and resentment of Microsoft, loudly predicted nightmare scenarios populated by "blue screens", driver conflicts and installer bugs. I'd swear that as late as the night before we launched most of the gaming world expected to see a Start Menu when they fired up the box.
And the early criticism from inside Microsoft was almost as deafening.
But what few people got at first was that our hopes for Xbox really did come from a simple, pure place: we wanted to build the console we'd always dreamed of developing games for ourselves. Powerful, easy to program, tricked out with mature, capable tools we'd grown up using in the PC gaming world. But a console at its heart -- always a console. For us, Xbox wasn't about taking market share from Sony or piling up even more buckets of money for Microsoft (although we always knew the money would come). We wanted to win over the hearts and minds of developers -- and by winning over the developers, we knew we could win over the hearts and minds of gamers by enabling truly wonderful new games to be conceived.
And sure enough, one by one, they came. First a few, then dozens, and then an army.
Considering the amazing pace of technology advances, our very first thoughts on Xbox included the somewhat misguided notion that we might upgrade the system every TWO years. Now wouldn't that have been disruptive!
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Full Story: mercurynews.com
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