BEFORE MICROSOFT'S CUSTODIAL STAFF COULD wash the blood from the walls of the conference room where the Valentine's Day Massacre took place, the Xbox team was already looking ahead to their next hurdle: The 2000 Game Developers Conference, just one month out.

Looking back, the Valentine's Day Massacre became arguably the most important date in Xbox history. Before then, the console was like an assemblage of pieces and parts still to be assembled into a top-of-the-line race car. The moment Gates and Steve Ballmer gave their collective nod, all those components flew together into a vehicle expected to go from zero to 1,000 miles per hour in a single heartbeat. GDC was just the first of many laps the team would have to navigate over the next 18 months.

Part 1: Raven and the Robot

Bill Gates planned to share the stage with Seamus Blackley, whose contributions to and enthusiasm for what Xbox would represent--a platform by developers, for developers and players--made him the perfect tag-team partner for Gates.

Planning got underway. Blackley tracked down Microsoft's design pro, Horace Luke, to brainstorm a prototype unit that would serve as the perfect representation of what Xbox would offer--one day, when its specs were set in stone, and the team had settled on designs for pesky little details like controllers and the console itself. They would also need tech demos to give developers, the conference's target audience, an impression of how powerful the Xbox would be--one day.

In the middle of wrangling demos, bargaining with tech companies like Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, and scouting developers to make games for Xbox, two things happened in rapid succession. The first was a leak about the platform's existence that dribbled out of Microsoft and into the bucket of one of the industry's most venerated publications.

TOM RUSSO (editor, Next Generation magazine): I have still never gone on record with my sources. At the time it was the nature of the job to just be talking to everyone, I had a lot of friends at developers, publishers, people generally liked what we were doing at the magazine, essentially we were articulating the stories behind all the amazing technology and artistry going into making games that was simply being dismissed as kids' stuff by the general population. So there was a lot of goodwill.

In the summer of '99, an independent developer, whom I trust implicitly, told me they heard about it from someone who they worked with at Microsoft. I mentioned it to Chris Charla, and it was in the back of our minds, when I got confirmation from another friend of mine who worked at a third-party publisher who heard it directly from Microsoft. Once I had two very separate sources, with different pathways into Microsoft saying the same thing, we felt comfortable running with what we had. The fact that it was just such a big idea.

After discussing it with Chris Charla that night, he had half the story already written when I got in the next day, and we finished it together. We got a firm "no comment" from Microsoft, and the story it ran in the October '99 issue. After that we continued to publish news on the story monthly as we got it. We had most of the story before Bill Gates took the stage at GDC 2000 to make Microsoft's entry into the console business official.

 SEAMUS BLACKLEY (co-creator of Xbox): Someone leaked to him. It's a funny story-- he called me (he knew me a bit) as I was driving to the mocap session for the robot/raven demo. I kept denying and denying which was hilarious since I was literally in the middle of getting the GDC 2000 announcement happening. I can't remember if he believed me or not. We are close friends to this day as a result of that, even though I stonewalled him. He always has that over me, and I have never found out how he figured it all out. Intrepid guy, the motherfucker.

TOM RUSSO: After the official announcement, we got a lot of access to the folks at Microsoft, including project leads Seamus Blackley and Ed Fries, who I got to know better in the time after and still have a huge amount of respect for. The toll this project exacted on both of them, the stress, personally, I think was tremendous. There was enormous pressure from the company but also internally, on themselves, they both cared very deeply about not screwing it up. If you asked them I'm sure they would both tell you they suffer remnants of Xbox PTSD.

It was one of those "once in a lifetime" story opportunities. It definitely felt like that at the time, and to this day.

Word of the Xbox spread through the industry, but Microsoft wouldn't (and couldn't) let it interrupt preparations for GDC.

ROBBIE BACH (Chief Xbox Officer): The way I would describe Seamus would be exceptionally passionate. He was deep into the concept: loved the concept, loved the idea, believed in it in a big way. He was a super-creative guy and was a bit of a showman, and good at it. In the early days when we were in the evangelism stage for Xbox, he played a pivotal role. The reason he was on-stage with Bill was because he was a great salesperson for that kind of thing. He could speak to developers in a compelling, evangelical way.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: I think I was onstage because we built the stuff. Because that was our thing. It was genuine because unlike a lot of situations in big corporations where you have someone giving the demo who's a political leader of something or the marketing person, I had the incredible honor of being the guy who was most excited about this thing; who had spent the most time with it and led the team to build it, also talking about it.

KEVIN BACHUS (co-creator of Xbox): I realized for the GDC announcement we had to have something on-stage so people knew we weren't all smoke and mirrors. If you think about it, whenever there was an announcement of a new Sega, Sony, or Nintendo platform, what did they look like? They looked like PCs. You had a custom-developed circuit board that fit into a PC housing. That was the target. Program on a PC, download the program onto the development system, and then run it. But if we went out in front of the most cynical and skeptical audience you can imagine--the game development community--and showed them something that looked like a PC, we were done. That was the fear. At the same time, we hadn't designed the console yet. We didn't know what it was going to look like.

The suggestion I made to Seamus and the team was, 'We've got to build something that is clearly not a PC, but at the same time, something that wouldn't necessarily be confused for actually being a console.' We built this gigantic chrome X. In one of the legs, we had the motherboard. We crammed a DVD drive crammed into another leg, and the hard drive in another. It looked fantastic and weighed a ton, and it was obviously not something people would be able to buy. Now we had to unveil what it was going to look like.

DAN 'ELEKTRO' AMRICH (editor, GamePro magazine): In 2000, I do remember being at GDC and thinking the chrome prototype was super cool.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY (co-creator of Xbox): The reason for it was to be a show car. We were still an unofficial project at that point with no budget. We had to figure out how to build something that would be a credible console to the world when they saw it, but that obviously wasn't a final product because there's no way you can make a final product with no budget and a small team.

We stress-tested them, put them in cases, dragged them up and down stairs, threw them across the parking garage, and opened them up and saw they still worked. It was a labor of love for a very small group of people that seemed like a big corporate effort from the outside.

On the hunt for a purveyor of jaw-dropping visuals, Seamus turned to Blur Studio, a company founded on the premise of creating special effects and films.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: The video game audience is attuned to any sort of bullshit; developers even more so. We needed to be really honest and couldn't bullshit on any technical specs. We couldn't bullshit about demos. We needed to have things running in real time because they would be tested and dissected frame by frame.

KEVIN BACHUS: I'm very proud of the fact that we never showed a single demo--internally, or at GDC, or to a developer--that wasn't running on our hardware. One exception was that at GDC, we showed a pre-rendered video that the team at Blur Studios made.

TIM MILLER (director, co-founder of Blur Studios): The first Xbox [cinematic] that was done for Seamus [Blackley], we were able to do it so fast in part because I had optioned this book called Mindbridge by Joe Halderman. It was the first book I'd ever optioned. These characters go around in these big suits; TAMER suits they're called. We had been building this TAMER suit because we were going to do a proof of concept of Mindbridge. That’s when Seamus called and said, "I've got three weeks. What can you do?"

It was Seamus Blackley who came to us and said, "Bill Gates is going to announce the Xbox in three weeks on stage, and I need something to play behind him. What can you do? I hear you guys are the Navy SEALs of 3D Studio Max." So we scrambled to put that piece together with Raven and the robot. Microsoft loved the video.

KEVIN BACHUS: We said, 'This is using poly counts, geometry, and shaders that will be available in real-time when we get the final chip, and this is what it will look like.' That's the only thing we ever showed where we said, 'We've shown you stuff on current-generation hardware, but the next iteration, the one we'll have in production units, will be further along. We'll show you a video of that now.'

And sure enough, it looked like it did when we got things running in real-time. I'm very proud of the fact that everything else we showed from the beginning to the end was actual, real, no-smoke-and-mirrors, could-have-failed-at-any-moment game demos.

The last obstacle for the team before the presentation was rehearsal for the presentation itself. Gates, a pro at speaking with audiences, made his way through the script step by step, until his PR handler took umbrage with a character made by one of the developers the Xbox team hoped to court.

KEVIN BACHUS: It's the night before the keynote. We're in the auditorium: Seamus, me, Bill, Bill's PR person, and a few other people. We did a run-through: 'Bill, we're going to go over here; now we're going to go over there.' Then he said, 'Show me the demos you guys are going to do.' So we showed him. At one point, we had arranged for a couple of videos to show. One was the demo that we did with Tim [Miller] and the team at Blur Studios to show what a real-time [application] would be. Another was a demo with Midway Games. We'd arranged a video clip about Ready 2 Rumble with Afro Thunder talking about that.

When we showed it to Bill's PR person before rehearsal, she lost her mind. 'No freaking way are we going to show that.' Here's a somewhat-caricatured African American, and Microsoft had just had a flare-up where there was clipart, stock photography, for Office, and one was an African American family sitting in front of what's commonly referred to as monkey bars. If you put in the word 'monkey,' you got this smiling African-American family because it returned monkey bars.

Some felt it was offensive because there was a secret racist at Microsoft who coded it so that if you put in 'monkey,' you'd see this African-American family. It was coded so that "monkey" returned [images of] monkey bars.

CNN MONEY (June 30, 1999): A new lawsuit accuses Microsoft Corp. of including a racially insensitive graphic in its popular publishing software that suggests a connection between black people and monkeys. John Elijah filed the complaint Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Diego, claiming Microsoft's Publisher 98 program contains 'an inherently racist element' in its image gallery. Elijah is suing Microsoft (MSFT) for $75,000 in damages for extreme humiliation, embarrassment and emotional distress. According to the filing, Elijah, a field supervisor at Janus Corp., was subjected repeatedly to racist comments and behavior after being exposed to the image in the presence of several co-workers, all of whom are white.

WIRED (July 1, 1999): Microsoft's [spokesperson Adam] Sohn said that there are several other photos of the black couple sitting on the swings and without any playground equipment, and they do not appear when the word 'monkey' is typed in. Sohn said that there are 18 keywords associated with this picture, and one of them is 'monkey bars,' a piece of playground equipment. However, the search function reads 'monkey' and pulls up the picture of the couple. Other keywords that pull up the picture include 'man,' 'woman,' and 'playground equipment.' Sohn said that the offending problem was discovered in early 1999 by a Microsoft employee testing the software. He said that the company acted quickly to correct the problem, and informed all registered users of the software by 7 May.

The company consulted two leaders in the black community, Bill Gray of the United Negro College Fund and Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of the African American studies department at Harvard University, for advice, and created a special patch for users to download to correct the problem. Despite the efforts to correct the problem, Sohn understands why people were upset. 'The net result of the search was offensive and inappropriate,' he said. 'We certainly regret any offense, inconvenience, or discomfort this may have caused anyone and we are deeply committed to doing everything possible to prevent something like this from happening in the future.'

KEVIN BACHUS: Bill made a big donation, and we apologized. His PR person was like, "Great. We just dealt with this scandal. Now Bill's going to do this presentation, and the headline the next day is going to be, 'Bill Gates insults African-Americans.'" My response was, 'You don't think the headline's going to be, "Bill Gates unveils game console?'' She said, "No way. We're not going to do it."

We run through all this with Bill. I, not being particularly worried about my job security, I said, 'There is this one other thing, Bill, but Mitch doesn't want us to do it.' He goes, 'I'd like to see it.' Mitch is shooting daggers out of her eyes at me. We roll the thing. He looks at it, thinks for a moment, and says, 'Okay. So, that's an actual video game character from a real video game?' We said, 'Uh-huh.' He said, 'People in the audience who see this will know who that character is?' I said, 'Uh-huh.' He said, 'I don't see a problem with it. It's not like we're poking fun at him, or he's somehow a negative character. Let's do it.' And boy was she angry. That ended up going into the demos. Sure enough, the headlines the next day were not 'Bill Gates insults African-Americans.' Not one person to my knowledge ever found offense with that clip.

Part 2: Elevator Action

After weeks of long nights and stress headaches, the Xbox team looked forward to their console being on the tip of every developer's tongue. The announcement would be like the words to an incantation, a spell that, once spoken, would imbue them with the strength to will the machine into existence. First, they had to muster the courage to step on stage and speak the spell.

KEVIN BACHUS: That morning, we were in the Wall Street Journal, in this very plauditory article by Dean Takahashi about how these four renegades inside of Microsoft were able to make this thing happen. Then Bill does his thing and it went really well despite our fears that demos would crash or something like that, the fights we had to have to get certain content in the demo.

ROBBIE BACH (Chief Xbox Officer, Microsoft): Take a look at the video of Seamus onstage with Bill, showing the first four demos of what we were projecting the Xbox could produce. That was from the Game Developers Conference 2000 or 2001 in San Jose. Those four videos--bouncing ping-pong balls, giant robots--those were of Seamus's creations. I'm sure a bunch of other people helped with the work, but Seamus was the maestro of that demonstration, and of the big, black metal Xbox, which was nothing but a showpiece. It was never part of the design methodology, but it was cool.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: I remember being almost catatonic with panic that morning. I thought that would end my career if I fucked up. Bill absolutely understands that moment of doing something for the first time, of figuring it out and the privilege and thrill of that. I think that's what I wanted. People would say, "It reminds Bill of the old days." All these guys who"d been at Microsoft for a long time--like Rick Rashid--who would tell me, "You remind me of us when we were young."

That was a big compliment from them. "Hey, that crazy red-headed guy reminds us of when we were young!" Yeah, except that when you were young, you didn't have this bureaucracy you had to face.

TIM MILLER (director, co-founder of Blur Studios): Microsoft loved the video. And they liked working with us. Then Horace [Luke] called us about the logo stuff. But I don't think that went anywhere other than some prototype designs. My wife, who runs the company now, is a brilliant designer and handled most of the logo exploration. She joined in year three because she said, "I'm never going to see you unless I come and work at Blur." I came up with a lot of interface ideas too but I'm not a designer, so they were more illustrative, conceptual ideas. I don't think any of that was useful.

Over the coming months, developers and publishers would make their thoughts on Microsoft stepping into the ring against Sony, Microsoft, and Sega. The aftermath of GDC gave them an early taste of what they might expect.

DAN 'ELEKTRO' AMRICH (editor, GamePro magazine): Sony made video players and Walkman. Microsoft made Excel. The skepticism was understandable. Microsoft was also one of those companies people loved to hate. There was always a stigma—"oh, Bill Gates is a super-rich nerd" and strange biases about the company and its personalities that had little to do with the products they made. It was "I don't like big companies" and "why does he have all this money" and of course lots of jokes about their consoles blue-screening.

But honestly, they were the new player in the realm, so any challenger is going to be greeted with skepticism—show, don't tell. Until people tried the games themselves, there would be no reason to trust in the new platform.

TOM RUSSO (editor, Next Generation magazine): At the time, and where we were in terms of the evolution of electronic devices, it was essentially the logical step in the cold war between Sony, who owned the living room with TVs and audio, and Microsoft, who owned the office and the home PC OS. A set-top game device with PC and internet functionality was the trojan horse to the living room. For these companies, it was a much bigger play than just "people like games" which probably wouldn't have moved the needle to the same degree, certainly not just within Microsoft, who had been experimenting and failing with early "WebTV" devices.

DAN 'ELEKTRO' AMRICH: I was slightly skeptical, but not too much. I had used Microsoft's game controllers at that point, and felt they were fundamentally good hardware; I figured, well, if it's an extension of this games-focused group, I'm interested. I remember hearing rumors that the original Xbox was basically just going to be a PC, and I thought that was a double-edged sword—if it were true, it was good news for developers, because the pipeline would likely be built with solid tools.

On the other hand, we'd seen PC games move to consoles where they didn't feel right, and I was concerned about whether the machine would have its own identity or would be a dumping ground for quick ports.

With the stress of the announcement behind them, the Xbox team looked forward to what came immediately after: A party whose awesomeness was commensurate with the weight of the project they had worked so hard to publicize.

Twinning.
Good times, my friend and cheers to all the good work you & Melinda do for humanity. For the record, Im clearly talking about symmetrical multiprocessing in the photo.
Whilst wearing myhttps://t.co/Cq0AqLoRPU

— Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) January 6, 2020

KEVIN BACHUS (co-creator of Xbox): The schedule we were on was insane. We were doing so much stuff. And part of it was--not for me, but for others--there was a calculated move to create separation between the Xbox team and stodgy old Microsoft. That was something that came up in focus groups: "I don't really trust Microsoft to build a game console. But if you say there's this thing called Xbox, and it's backed by Microsoft--Microsoft's money, Microsoft's power, Microsoft's technological know-how--then that's a different story."

We seemed to go a little extra crazy at trade shows. When we announced the Xbox at GDC, a bunch of things happened.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: We had some big dinner planned after the keynote. I had to go to this thing, had to do press all day. I don't know if you've spent much time in the Convention Center, but the trolley line goes between the big auditorium and the convention center. After the keynote and everybody had left, after I'd apologized to the AMD people, I went to walk across the street and stepped in front of the trolley. I had to be pulled back. I was so in a different world, so exhausted. I felt a real sense of redemption in some ways.

I also felt we had cemented the project now. It would be very hard for Microsoft not to do it after that. Which sounds ludicrous, but you have to understand: It was 10 guys and a dream, but now Bill Gates was there at the Game Developers Conference so it was going to happen. It was really hard to describe what a corner it turned.

Then I discovered I had to do press all day, so I was exhausted from saying the same thing over and over again to people. I had all these journalists who were happy to talk to me because I was trying to be genuinely enthusiastic as I talked with them and listened to them. So we get to this dinner at this restaurant on top of a parking structure.

KEVIN BACHUS: This restaurant is on top of a parking garage. You have to take an elevator to get up to it. We're blowing off steam, and a lot of the long-time Microsoft guys who'd done much better than us in life were being super-loud. The maître d's like, "You're disturbing the other customers," and they said, "We'll buy their dinners!" and being generally obnoxious.

We all got on the elevator, and I mean we all got on the elevator. We pressed one, and the door's still open, but the elevator starts to descend. Seamus is talking to somebody else.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: We went up there and had some champagne, and there were all these people who suddenly knew who I was and wanted to talk to me. I was trying to be nice, but I was so tired. I wanted to sleep and try to figure out what the fuck had just happened. A bunch of people came along with me. We all got in this elevator to go down from the top of this parking structure to the bottom and walk across the street to our hotel.

There were too many people in the elevator. I think I said, "Fuck it, don't worry about it," and hit the down button.

KEVIN BACHUS: Seamus looks around and sees his party leaving, so he jumps into the elevator. We're in free fall. People are like, "Oh, shit. What's going to happen when we get to the bottom?"

We crash at the bottom.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: The elevator went into some sort of safety mode. It was a hydraulic elevator with a big hydraulic piston in the middle. It started to just fall. It wasn't a fast fall, but it descended more rapidly than one would have wanted, in a way one wasn't used to. It hit the bottom springs and everybody fell down. The door opened with the floor halfway up the door. Alarms are going off.

Right at that moment, there was this this Blackley's Razor test: Who had been a hoodlum in high school, and who hadn't? The guys who had done exploits before--me included--immediately took off, while the good citizens were there saying, "Oh, we should call someone."

KEVIN BACHUS: Nobody's really hurt because we only dropped, like, five floors and it's not like we were at terminal velocity. 'Should we wait here for the police?' The other half were like, 'Get the door open! Run!' So of course, Monday morning, the Wall Street journal is like, 'Xbox team breaks elevator.' I'm not sure how they knew about that, but it was interesting.

My dude. What a day that was. Just another day for the great @TheRock and @BillGates, but for me, a nearly out of body experience as our crazy idea was made real. Thanks man. That was one of my formative moments, part of my soul. And also on my birthday. https://t.co/j4VTMqRwKo

— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) January 6, 2020

Part 3: World Warriors

"If you build it, they will come" worked for Kevin Costner. For the Xbox team, convincing developers that Microsoft could hang in the console business would take more than a chrome "X" and flashy demos.

The Xbox crew planned to divide and conquer, visiting studios around the globe to fulfill Ed Fries's portfolio approach to recruitment: Representation for as many genres as possible. Japanese companies were the hardest to win over. Sega, Sony, and Nintendo had roots in the east, and, while occasionally difficult to work with, had proven track records of success. When Capcom's executive received visitors from Microsoft, Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami asked, in Japanese, how they defined the vision of their console. Nintendo made toys. Sony made entertainment. What did Microsoft seek to create?

Kevin Bachus's palms grew sweaty as he waited for his translator to explain what Mikami had asked. Another team member failed to answer, and Mikami stormed from the room. When Bachus finally received a translation, he fumed. He'd been ready to answer, "Games are art." That was how he and Seamus Blackley thought of games and game development.

That meeting could have changed the course of gaming history. Complaining publicly that PlayStation 2's Emotion Engine overcomplicated development, Mikami and Capcom signed a deal with Nintendo that brought a remake of the original Resident Evil, Resident Evil 4, and three other games--known as the "Capcom Five"--to Nintendo's next-gen console, the GameCube, which would be competing with Xbox.

Some developers at Microsoft failed to grasp the significance of getting Japanese developers on their side. Blackley, Bachus, Fries, and others made it their priority to convince them and as many other global developers as they could visit that Xbox would be the ultimate curation platform for their works of art.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY (co-creator of Xbox): I was freaking out and saying, 'No, we need to get these guys. I need to go talk to these guys.' They were like, 'Okay, go do whatever you need to do.' I've gone through all this shit. I understand something about it, and the problem isn't the platform. It's the business behind taking risks on new ideas. We can't solve the problem entirely from the standpoint of a platform, especially if we're not willing to write big checks to developers. What Sony does, and what Nintendo does in a different way.

[Former President of Sony Interactive Entertainment Shuhei] Yoshida-san is one of my favorite people. Shu is a gentleman, a real gamer, with a big heart, and he takes risks. He fucking bets on black. He finds talented people and he backs them. If they fuck up and milestones are missed, he keeps backing them because he knows that's where really special things come from. That takes incredible amounts of courage, and that's something hard for a company to learn, especially a company like Microsoft which, at the time, had no idea that [video games] was an entertainment business, not a platform business.

ED FRIES (vice president, Microsoft Game Studios): I was head of first-party. Third-party relations were under J Allard pre-launch. Post-launch, I was put in charge of that too. I was running both our internal game production and flying around the world talking to Electronic Arts, Activision, Take-Two, and Japanese developers, trying to convince them to support Xbox.

KEVIN BACHUS (co-creator of Xbox): I was publisher relations. We were in charge of concept submission and the head-end of stuff, managing the portfolio and that sort of thing. I think we did a lot of meetings at E3 2000. That's where we had a lot of the business conversations, and we had a lot of the technical conversations probably at or before GDC [2000].

We went on a tour, Seamus and I, where we met with game publishers. We did this in two phases. We were advised by Jennifer Booth, who had worked for Sony and helped them launch PlayStation, that it was best to first go in and get the hearts and minds of developers. It was very heavily scripted. We're talking mostly about publishers more so than developers.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: There were times I had to go out with straight-up yakuza guys. There was no Microsoft executive who would go to dinner with yakuza guys. It had to be me. People would look at you funny for that, and I didn't know how to do that. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to swallow live fish in Japanese drinks and have Japanese guys make fun of me for being white and turning colors. But I did it because I had a sense of adventure about it, and it worked out. It was hard, and Brett [Schnepf, Xbox developer] really helped me there. He came with me on a couple of those trips. One time he got me home safe, and God bless him for that.

KEVIN BACHUS: For the first circuit, we went around with a very tight PowerPoint and demos we showed people that really were focused on the technical capabilities of the system we were building. What was the performance going to be like? How will it work? What was the console going to be, and what would it be like to develop for it? What was our philosophy behind building it?

We met with technical staff mostly, but of course executives wanted to be in as well. But it was more a technically focused, 'What is this thing going to be and how will it work?' That was phase one. We did a tech-focused presentation: 'This is the NVIDIA chip. This is the Intel chip. This is the hard drive.' We got them all excited and showed them demos working on actual hardware. ' We had to disabuse them of this knowledge that hardware that began life in the PC world couldn't step up and deliver.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: I went to go meet with Tomonobu Itagaki because we needed a fighting game and I really liked fighting games. Our first meeting was so odd. It was at their office, and he walked in wearing his sunglasses and his black jacket. Back then he was very standoffish. He didn't want to talk to me until we'd played Dead or Alive together. He wanted to see if I could play the game. We fought, and then he talked to me once he figured out I could play. I could be trusted. When we showed the game, I think I was the only person who was allowed to have it by myself. Every other person had to have one of Tecmo's staff with them.

KEVIN BACHUS: Then we did a second round of meetings talking about the process. I had members of my team with me during phase two. I think J may have been in a lot of those meetings. It was a lot of, "Yes, there will be royalties; here's what they'll be. There will be an approvals process; here's how that will work."

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: There was no approval process [at that stage]. We were just trying to seem serious. That was fronting. That was total fronting.

KEVIN BACHUS: Phase two was, what's the approval process going to be like? How will manufacturing work? How do you submit to QA? That sort of thing. That was a presentation. It was grueling. We did this over several days on multiple continents. We split the content in each of the meetings. I did a lot of the presentation, a lot of the setup; Seamus did more of the technical specifics.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: Really, the most important thing I did, aside from not giving up when it was hard early on, was go everywhere and meet every developer to convince them. That was the most important thing I did. Everything else paled in comparison. I remember coming back to Microsoft sometimes and finding all the political machinations going on. My office had been moved; this guy's claiming credit for this stuff. That didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was having developers believing in the platform. We would have taken anything from any of the good developers with almost no approval. But you can't say that.

KEVIN BACHUS: I found myself saying things that don't make sense if an audience isn't [familiar with context]. Like, 'As I was saying earlier today...' And people were like, 'Well, we don't give a shit what you said to other people.' Because we did the same presentation over and over, answering the same questions, it messed with the way I presented things. I talked mostly about the philosophy, the bigger-picture stuff. Seamus talked more about nuts and bolts, the technical aspect of it. I don't believe he was in the second round of meetings because I think he was busy supporting developers.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: I showed up to EA Vancouver, and the guys running Vancouver, a very important studio for EA, were Don Mattrick and Paul Lee. There was a fancy new office in Vancouver. They had a big theater in there, and I'd brought along the prototype and was going to do a demo. The two guys who ran it came and said, 'You're not giving your demo. We're not letting you talk to our guys.' It was a bullshit political move, but I didn't know that at the time. I was a 20-something. They said, "We don't believe you're going to get this done. This is a bullshit project, Seamus. Come on. You're the Trespasser guy, " because EA was the publisher of Trespasser. They were insulting me about that.

They didn't think Microsoft could ever make a console. And mind you, this is the guy who ended up being the Xbox boss for some period of time. Eventually I just called Bill's office. I was like, 'Is Bill around? I'm at EA, and these guys don't believe Microsoft is going to support this console and need Bill to talk to them or something.' Whoever answered the phone for Bill--Bill always had a tech guy working for him; that's what Gabe Newell was, and the guy who runs Sucker Punch; Brian [Fleming, co-founder]is a really good guy--it was the tech guy, and he said, "Bill is traveling, but that's crazy. Bill would be really pissed off to hear that." This is on speakerphone. That scared these guys enough that they let me do the presentation.

Developers viewed the final form of the Xbox with mixed feelings. Weighing in at seven pounds, it took the form of a wide, thick black box, the top concave to accommodate plastic bars that formed an "X."

ED FRIES: What Xbox really ended up being was something in between: ideas from what the Windows CE team did, and what we thought we could do originally with Xbox.

KEVIN BACHUS: The hard drive, but also, air cooling. There needed to be air circulation to cool the graphics chip and, to a lesser extent, the CPU. The power supply was also enormous. We didn't want to do an external brick, but that meant the power supply had to be large. They came back and said, "We've laid it out into a rectangle. This is the size." We could create something artistic out of plastic over that rectangle, but that's the rectangle we had to enclose.

They said, "We spent so much money on the GPU and hard drive that we can't spend a lot of money on the fancy plastic and do the cool stuff you guys have in mind. We're not even going to do a dual-tone paint job like you wanted. We're basically going to do injection-mold plastic, and whatever color plastic we choose--probably black--is how it's going to be. And we'll put a little medallion on the top, and we're done."

DON COYNER (marketing on Xbox): The Xbox can also heat your house.

ED FRIES: It was the first game console that shipped with a hard disk and had an x86 processor. The internal architecture was basically a PC that had a North and South Bridge, which has something to do with what connects parts of the PC together. They had tweaked a few parts as a copy protection mechanism to make it a little harder for people to crack, but that was done almost as an afterthought. There wasn't much effort put into that. Hardware-wise, it was very much a PC.

ROBBIE BACH (Chief Xbox Officer): Function over form. That box was not designed from the box out to in; it was designed from the inside hardware out. We figured out what layout we could get done. We looked at the heat dynamics and said, 'This is the enclosure we need.' We put a cool logo on it to make it look cool. We gave it the fan look so that it looked like it had some design element to it, and it actually helped dissipate heat. And we called it good.

The original Xbox was much more, this has to ship on this date so this is what we've got, and it's off-the-shelf parts so there's only so much I can do, and it generates X amount of heat, oh, and it's got a hard drive in it. The enclosure guys said, 'Well, if that's what we've got to deal with...'

KEVIN BACHUS: Unfortunately, it wasn't the console of our dreams. We'd spent so much money on the hard drive and other components that Microsoft wanted to share some money off of it. We had this enormous rectangle that we had to build plastic around, and we didn't want to spend much on the plastic, so that became Xbox.

ROBBIE BACH: The original idea was to have the Xbox logo light up when you turned it on. Of course, that turned out to be not cost effective and probably not practical, so we went with the green half ball on the top that no one ever figured out why it was there.

While Xbox was in development, a few engineers eyed other markets to conquer and set their sights on Nintendo's Game Boy. Their response: the "Xboy," a working name for a prospective handheld system.

ROBBIE BACH: These people really thought about it. They'd done some exploration and looked into what the architecture would look like. There was a PowerPoint plan for it. To my knowledge, no actual work ever got done and no resources ever got approved. But certainly there were people who had done due diligence and put together a plan.

Part 4: What the Gates is Cookin'

Nearly one year after announcing the Xbox at GDC, Gates and Seamus Blackley took the stage again, this time at the annual CES in Las Vegas in January 2001. Gates started out on his own and, after a brief introduction, revealed the Xbox sitting on a pedestal behind him. He was joined by WWE (then WWF) Superstar Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, then just beginning his career in Hollywood, to hype the crowd for the first official look at Microsoft's debut game console.

Finally, Seamus Blackley--wearing "illegal red shoes" as an in-joke to developers in the audience, referencing a shade of red that manifests on-screen as a shade of green, and thus taboo in the games industry--practically bounced onstage to talk technical and development details with Gates.

But Blackley's shoes were more than an inside joke. "Yes, Microsoft is making this console," he seemed to communicate through footwear, "but we get you."

KEVIN BACHUS (co-creator of Xbox): The console was under a cloth, and I think I still have it somewhere. It was just fabric we threw over it. We wanted to make it a fun unveiling and show there was developer support coming because we hadn't been clear about who was on board and developing games at that point. We went to the folks at THQ, who published the WWE games, and they arranged for The Rock to come. Rock and Bill had some cool back and forth, some banter. He was very professional, sweet, very humble. Very much what you see on-screen, and one of the few people I can say that about.

SEAMUS BLACKLEY (co-creator of Xbox): I had to do this live video chat, AMA-type of thing I had to do because somebody else didn't do it. I had champagne and it obliterated me because I was tired. I was always so fucking tired.

KEVIN BACHUS: We'd made an arrangement with the marketing team that we were going to have a party. We were staying in Mandalay Bay, and there was a club there called the Rumjungle. They told us, 'We have secured the Rumjungle for our party. It's for press first, and then later for game developers. The only thing you need to know about it is that game developers can't be there for the first hour. It's press only.' My wife [Chanel Summers, audio engineer on Xbox] and I went back to our room to change. I come down at the time the developers are supposed to be there, and it's chaos. What we weren't told was they hadn't actually rented out the Rumjungle. They basically got a section of it. On a Friday night. In Vegas.

Not only that, they hadn't told us there was a dress code. These developers thought they would show solidarity. They showed up wearing Xbox t-shirts, and we'd made custom Xbox tennis shoes; they wore those. This was all against the dress code. So I arrive, and it's chaos. People were yelling. My wife was supposed to go in and do an interview with MTV. There was a miscommunication between the bouncers. One of them was waving her in, and the one in front of him was telling her to wait. The guy in the front puts his hand on her chest, and I'm told women don't appreciate that. She freaks out and says, 'Get your hands off of me.' [The bouncer] calls Mandalay Bay security and says, 'This woman needs to be escorted off the property.'

So I jump over the velvet ropes, which they didn't appreciate, and start arguing with security about this. They're not even listening. I said, 'This is what happened,' and they say, 'You're going to have to leave.' I said, 'We're staying on the property. Where are we supposed to go?' They said, 'That's not our problem.' They're used to people who have actually done something bad. They're not thinking about how this works in a case where the bouncers misbehaved. They said, 'Either you leave, or we call the police.' I said, 'Great. Call the police. This place is full of security cameras, so let's look at that.' Finally I said, 'What do you want me to do? We're staying in the hotel.' They said, 'All right, here's what you can do. You can go back to your room but you have to stay there all day.' It was like my mom sending me to my room.

ROBBIE BACH (Chief Xbox Officer): If I remember that CES correctly, I flew down with Bill, did a bunch of prep work with Bill, did the announcement, met with development partners, and came back home. I'm sure the team had a party. You've gotten to know me well enough by now to know that that isn't my scene. I wasn't there. I heard about it, though.

KEVIN BACHUS: So we do that, and I get up to our room and I call the front desk, and I'm not thinking straight. I have to admit that: This is not my proudest hour. I say to them the following words, not realizing what I'm actually saying: 'We are being held against our will in our room, and I want to see a manager here in the next 30 seconds.' So of course SWAT shows up, and then the real Mandalay Bay security, and the manager of the hotel. They realize we're not being held hostage, but I explain what happened and the manager's mortified. But of course he doesn't own the Rumjungle; it's concession. He said, 'Look, I work with this guy all the time. I'll come down and explain things to him. I'm sure this will be fine.'

And of course the next day they send us a giant fruit basket and that kind of stuff. But that night, they still won't let us in. The guy's like, 'I've got to support my guys.' The manager said, 'Look, she's clearly not intoxicated.' The guy said, 'I can find six people who say she's hopped up on PCP, and she took out a knife.' Meanwhile, Seamus comes out and says, 'Dude, where have you been? MTV is waiting.' And the Rumjungle guy is like, 'MTV?' And all the sudden she's admitted, but he says to her, 'You'd better be on your best behavior. We'll be watching you.'

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: People would say 'Rumjungle' to me in the halls at Microsoft for, like, a year after. There was this other Seamus, who I was not familiar with, who was this crazy man. People would mention things to me like I was fucking Indiana Jones or something. It was pretty wild.

Part 5: Fire Drills

The development of Xbox was not one, long crucible, but a series of gauntlets. No test portended disaster than the console's maiden voyage at annual Electronics Entertainment Xbox, where crowds of journalists, developers, and pundits would get their hands on the console, its whopper of a controller, and its most anticipated games just months before launch that fall.

ROBBIE BACH (Chief Xbox Officer): E3 in 2001 was kind of a disaster. No, that's being too polite. It was a disaster.

DON COYNER (marketing on Xbox): The console being buggy was a disaster. If you talk straight to people and say, 'We know this doesn't work, but trust me, it's coming'--no conversation was easy, but that was like, 'Okay... we're making a pretty big bet, here.'

The thing I was focused on was the games and letting people get hands-on with them. You needed to have enough demos set up so lots of people can come through, try it, get a buzz going, and believe it. Showing a video was like, 'Really? Don't show me a stupid rendered video because that's not what it's going to look like. I need to try this thing because it's all about the feel.' We had a big debate how many stations we should have. I think there was more of a belief that, 'Yeah, I don't know if they have to get their hands on it to believe.'

ROBBIE BACH: We made the decision, which turned out to be wrong, that we wanted to show Xbox games running at E3. We made that decision because we wanted people to believe the product was real and was going to ship on time, and we needed developers to finish their titles. That meant showing Halo. It meant trying to show a box that when you press the button, it turned on. Even if the games running in our booth were going to be on PC development kits, that was actually okay.

But at our press briefing, the morning after Sony took all the press people out for a long party and they were all hungover for an eight o'clock briefing from Microsoft, I pressed the button and the box didn't turn on.

That whole press briefing was bad. Electronic Arts came to demonstrate a game they were doing for us, which was a pirate game. The demo, because the guy didn't do it right, consisted of a ship bumping itself into rocks. The only highlight of that E3 press briefing was [Peter Moore, who was amazing. Peter's a great showman anyway. He gave a great talk on why Sega was supporting the platform and was very convincing. He was the only person in that entire hour, including me, who was convincing. Everything else was a mishmash of badness. Then Halo looked bad in the booth. It was unoptimized and running on PCs, and we shouldn't have shown it.

ED FRIES (vice president, Microsoft Game Studios): When we showed it at the final E3 before launch, what we had on the show floor was a four-player, split-screen multiplayer demo. The Bungie guys were proud of it, and rightly so. That's hard to do even today, and doing it on that hardware at the time was incredible.

But that hardware, the graphics card, was half speed at what it would be in the shipping Xbox. The framerate wasn't great and people had a mediocre experience, but also it played into the idea that we were a PC gaming company that didn't know anything about consoles. I would get that question: "Who's your mascot?"

DAN 'ELEKTRO' AMRICH (editor, GamePro magazine): I also remember seeing footage of Halo and thinking "Wait, isn't this that Mac RTS? Oh, not anymore—I guess this is what's been taking so long." It looked pretty I wondered if it could live up to such long expectations, and if it was still going to be able to deliver on its promise now that it had apparently shifted genres. I had just been reviewing Myth II on PC and loved it, but I had never played Marathon, so silly me was thinking "Can Bungie really make an FPS?" Um, yes, they can redefine the FPS for consoles entirely.

I also remember being at a San Francisco media event where they revealed the final name and logo of the console. They invited dozens of journalists to this little outdoor party, and we all had cocktails, and the big moment arrives, and I guess it was Robbie Bach speaking—but he did like five or 10 minutes in front of a draped graphic, and they took the curtain down and...oh, the Xbox code name is now your brand name? And that was it—everybody just walked away and the music came up and there was nothing else to see or do.

I remember that being super awkward—I was disappointed that the brand name was not something cooler, and I remember leaving with a feeling of "That's it? I came all this way? You could have emailed that to me." So I remember some of their growing pains, as they carefully parceled out what got announced when, and after a while I just wanted to play the thing for myself.

Even the most passionate members of the Xbox team came away from E3 2001 with their heads hanging. The show had been a "disaster," as Bach aptly described it--and, for at least two members, marked the end of a long road.

ROBBIE BACH: Peter Moore's a good friend and a good guy. He came up a few weeks after that and said, "Here's the deal. Retailers are telling me they don't want to give you shelf space because they don't think the product's going to ship or be any good. Publishers are nervous and thinking about holding back their titles. Developers don't think they can develop because all they've seen is PC kits and they haven't gotten a final development kit, so they're withdrawing support. Other than that, everything is great."

Peter said it nicely. He's a friend. But this was four and a half months before we launched. I think his team was coming up to meet with the marketing team. Peter came up with them, and he and I had a private meeting in a conference room on the Millennium campus. We did a recap of E3, what we saw and heard, where we thought the project was, and what was going on. He'd done a bunch of market research; he was pretty disciplined about that. His point wasn't to come and beat us up. He was really trying to help.

At this point, he's been on-stage at E3 saying, "This is going to be successful." He'd been on-stage two or three weeks beforehand saying that, and part of that is telling you where things are. He said, "I want to tell you what I learned." It wasn't anything that surprised me. It wasn't anything I didn't understand intellectually. But it was pretty sobering. I knew E3 was bad, but oh shit, it really was bad, wasn't it?

KEVIN BACHUS (co-creator of Xbox): Right before E3, Seamus and I decided we wanted to start a production company and make games, not only for Xbox, but PlayStation as well. I was the head of the process, and Seamus was the tail-end of the process. I was publisher relations. We were in charge of concept submission and the head-end of stuff, managing the portfolio and that sort of thing. Seamus was responsible for developer support, so it was his obligation to see that these games got delivered.

I had a choice to make going into E3 2001: Did I want to stick around another year?

SEAMUS BLACKLEY (co-creator of Xbox): I couldn't leave. I made promises to people. I had to learn to stand up for myself. I had to step in. Part of the discipline I learned on Xbox was, these old Microsoft guys would try to bowl me over and grab the project away or take credit. They were just doing what they did. I couldn't let that happen because then the console would suck.

ROBBIE BACH: At the end of that period, late May, about two o'clock in the morning, I had been working way too hard. The pileup of 14 to 15 months of fire drills, plus E3, plus my conversation with Peter, plus what I saw going on at work--I wrote a letter of resignation and resigned from Microsoft. I shipped that email off to my boss, Rick [Belluzo, Microsoft's head of the consumer business after Robbie Bach joined Xbox full-time]. I was at home, in the playroom, at my little white, IKEA business desk where our PC was. I was remotely logged in, but it wasn't like it is today. I typed out an email at about two thirty in the morning. My personal life was a bit of a mess at the time. I wasn't seeing enough of my kids or my wife. I was super-frustrated. I knew the project was in trouble. I'm not a quitter. I'm super-competitive. And I'd had too much. It sort of boiled over.

The team was stretched thin. Stuff was maybe going to get done on time. Maybe. The team was not a high-performance team. It was an incredibly high-performance set of individuals. It might have been the smartest team of people I ever worked with at Microsoft. Maybe the Office team would have been in the same zip code. Really smart people individually intelligent and talented, but incredibly dysfunctional. That's my fault, not theirs. My job is the team. When you're the leader and you realize a group of very talented people is dysfunctional as a team, either consciously or subconsciously you go, Oh, shit. That's my problem. I felt a lot of responsibility for it, no question. To his credit, Rick called me the next morning and said, 'Hey. I think we should talk.'

KEVIN BACHUS: E3, from my perspective, kicked off the next year of titles we'd get from publishers. Or did I want to leave and start prospecting our next thing we wanted to do. Seamus really couldn't leave until the console was launched and all the launch titles had been deployed. To a large extent, I felt I had accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. On launch night, when the console came out, I stood outside the Electronics Boutique, the EBX Games, at Redmond Town Centre with the rest of the team. I got the launch lineup set, and right before E3, handed over the reins. Seamus stuck out until right after launch when all the launch games were done, shipped, and out in the market. We went and did our own thing.

ROBBIE BACH: Mostly, I think Rick was trying to help me. But I also think he knew that if I wasn't running it, he was going to have to run it, and he certainly didn't want to do that. He convinced me to stay and finish the project. He provided some support, some extra resources, some encouragement, made sure Bill and Steve knew where the team and I were. I was in a meeting and he called me. It was around seven thirty. He called me right away, and I suddenly had an eight thirty meeting with Rick. He said, "Okay, tell me what's going on."

I talked him through the email, told him what was going on personally and professionally. He said, "Okay. I get it. But you need to finish this. You really want to finish it. I know that's the kind of person you are. Let me help you figure things out personally, but let's agree that we're going to get it done."

Rick saved my career. There's no other way to say it. If I had left at that point, I would have given up the best eight or nine years of my time at Microsoft. I came out of that meeting feeling like, "Ah, shit. I gotta finish this. Okay. Suck it up. Get over it. Figure it out."

SEAMUS BLACKLEY: All this time, I had to really traumatize myself by standing up to people and making sure the right thing happened. I must have driven home in tears a hundred times with no idea what the fuck was going on or what to do. But I knew about games. I knew developers. I knew graphics. I knew things that all the other guys didn't know. It wasn't like I was playing that to my advantage, but I knew if they made decisions about things, they'd probably be bad decisions. I had to make sure that the right thing was going to happen.

That didn't mean I had to be the one making decisions, only that I had a responsibility to make sure that somebody with knowledge and perspective was in charge of all those parts. That drive to make sure the project came out right was the only thing on my mind.

After E3, the Xbox team and its development partners had approximately four months to lock down hardware and code so the system and its software would appear on shelves for launch on November 8. But their crucible was not finished yet.