THE MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL SCARS inflicted by 9/11 would linger for years, if not decades. Internally at Microsoft, logistics surrounding Xbox got pushed back one week, from November 8 to November 15.

That common goal provided the Xbox team with a constructive distraction. " it created a weird mood around the place," Ed Fries says of 9/11, "but we were so busy, maybe that was best: Heads down working on this project."

One logistic became a sticking point. In July 2001, Toys R Us spent $35 million to open a four-story, 110,00-square-foot location in Times Square, making it the largest retail outlet in New York's most famous destination and the company's flagship toy store. A 60-foot Ferris wheel in the center acted as a hub for themed sections such as a Barbie wing complete with life-size dreamhouse, hundreds of LEGO products, and a Jurassic Park area where a 20-foot animatronic T-Rex roared at shoppers.

The store became a hotspot for tourists, and executives hoped the spectacle and unbeatable foot traffic would attract companies looking for a unique place to hold big events. Microsoft jumped at the opportunity and coordinated a midnight launch for the Xbox. The company went all-out, even arranging for Bill Gates to greet customers as they stood in line and to sign Xbox packaging on their way out of the store.

Microsoft's team had saved the date months ago. Now, the prospect of returning to Times Square so soon after 9/11 caused doubt and unease. "New York bounced back pretty quickly, but the Xbox launch was one of the first big events there after 9/11," says Robbie Bach, chief Xbox officer. "The police were not excited. The last thing they wanted was Bill Gates in a Toys R Us in Times Square."

"We rented out Times Square and got Xbox up on all the screens," Fries adds. "But for launch, having a big line of people was not allowed. The New York police kept shutting down the line. They were really uncomfortable with a large group of people in one place. They broke the line up into little pieces as I remember, spreading it around multiple blocks."

"And they were great about it," Bach continues. "They worked with us and it all went fine, but you can imagine their sensibilities about whether that was a good idea."

Thousands of players flocked to Times Square and beheld an even more dazzling sight. Green search lights illuminated the area. Microsoft ordered Krispy Kreme donuts decorated with green sprinkles and passed them out to fans. The biggest treat was the appearance of Bill Gates himself. His first stop was WWF New York, a three-in-one restaurant, nightclub, and retail shop that wrestling impresario Vince McMahon set up in Times Square's Paramount Theatre. Gates was joined once again by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who picked up a Duke controller and faced Microsoft's co-founder in several rounds of Dead or Alive 3. A crowd of spectators cheered Gates on with chants of "Bill! Bill! Bill!"

For the first time in the 18 months since Seamus Blackley, Kevin Bachus, Otto Berkes, and Ted Hase entered his office and pitched him on a game console, Ed Fries relaxed. He'd been in PR mode since before 9/11, touting the console and its upcoming slate of games to magazines, newspapers, and websites. Before that, he'd launched dozens of PC games published by Microsoft. And before that, he had shipped marquee products such as the premiere version of Excel for Windows and attended lavish parties in celebration of release. Tonight, he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coat and smiled as he watched The Rock lay the SmackDown on his boss.

Don Coyner marveled at the spectacle he had helped engineer through marketing savvy: the biggest Toys R Us store in the world, the biggest wrestling start in the world, the world's most famous billionaire, and a gigantic, black-and-green video game console that millions of players would tear into in a matter of hours. "There were lots of things that were suboptimal, shall we say," Coyner admits, "but honest to god, it was a miracle. There was enough stuff that was right, or right enough, that it worked. If we'd had a bad first Christmas, we wouldn't be talking about Xbox today, probably. The team was small. We were trying to hire. We had all these personalities with ego stuff going on. We were getting clarity around which team was building this and who's in charge of that. It was hard. I found it to be an incredibly exhilarating thing."

"If you asked me if that was the hardest 18 months of my career, I probably wouldn't agree," Fries says, speaking to how Robbie Bach viewed the exciting yet grueling process of green-lighting and building Xbox. "I'd been on some incredible death marches to get versions of Excel and Word out, and I'd been running the games group for five years by that time; there was constantly something on fire. To me, it was more like status quo but with bigger numbers. This was a whole other order of magnitude. I remember being in London, maybe before or after launch, and we're on TV being interviewed by reporters. I was just happy that we did what we set out to do, but I knew in a way that it was just the start. But I tried to remind myself to enjoy it and not stress in advance about all the stuff we still had to do. I remember it as a happy and carefree night. I could just sit back and enjoy it."

"I'd lined up to get a video game console before. I lined up for the Dreamcast. To see that I had been a part of something that these people were that excited about was really cool," agrees Cam Ferroni, one of the system engineers on J Allard's team.

Before returning to New York, Robbie Bach had been running on fumes. In a few months, he would take a leave of absence from Microsoft to decompress from the stress of running the Xbox team and to reconnect with his wife and children. Before that, he had to get through tonight, and the forthcoming launch of Japan's Xbox launch in February, which he anticipated being a disaster, and the console's launch in Europe, which was an "X" variable he had yet to solve.

But that was later. As the sky darkened on launch night, the sights and sounds of excited gamers gave Bach a much-needed boost. "In the background, all this stuff was still a mess. But the energy of the launch of that event and that day... Look, when you create something, and people are lined up in New York City, around the block of the largest Toys R Us in the country? Pretty exciting. The CEO of Microsoft is signing boxes inside. That was pretty energizing. If I'm honest, there's a bit of PTSD as well. There's the excitement of the launch, and sort of the, Oh my gosh, I'm back in the city where this catastrophe happened, and I drove 55 hours across the country with three people I didn't know that well to get home. That was an interesting sociological dynamic."

Near midnight, the Xbox crew crossed the street over to Toys R US where Gates walked up and down rows shaking hands and posing for pictures. They made their way inside the store where Gates stepped behind the sales counter for his big moment. At midnight, the clerk scanned an Xbox console for 20=-year-old Edward Glucksman, who had secured the coveted first spot in line by waiting over 16 hours. Gates challenged Glucksman to a game, lost soundly, and greeted the next customer, who accepted his challenge only for Gates to lose again.

"I need to find more average gamers,'' Gates said according to a write-up of the launch in New York Times, ''not like the ones that are here tonight."

Nothing about the midnight launch of Xbox was average. Seamus Blackley beamed with pride as he watched his fellow gamers carry bags stuffed with games and hardware out of the store. His girlfriend, writer and critic Van Burnham, joined him for the festivities. Blackley introduced Burnham to Gates, who joked with Blackley that he might have found someone to help him get his act together.

I love you. https://t.co/81NYtx3OqO

— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) March 10, 2020

Gates nudged further when he told Blackley he should marry her and handed him a ring set with a square-shaped diamond and two baguettes on each side. Blackley proposed, and Burnham accepted to the delight of onlookers. Toys R Us CEO John Eyler rounded out the occasion by handing her a giant stuffed unicorn.

Blackley was all smiles for the rest of the night. He and Gates had set the stage months ago at the Consumer Electronics Show, when Blackley had outlined his idea and asked Gates if he'd take part. "He said, 'Okay,'" recalls Blackley of conspiring with Microsoft's co-founder. "The only other thing he said was, 'What if she says no?' I said, 'It's okay. She's not going to say no.' It never occurred to me not to ask him. I love the guy. If he had said no, that he didn't feel comfortable, I wouldn't have cared, and he probably would have thought it was hilarious that I asked him. When people play the ladder game, they're missing out on the fact that Bill's a human being. He built Microsoft. He's a weirdo. He's great. It never occurred to me not to ask him."

Replaying milestone moments from the last 18 months in his head—the executives' retreat, the Valentine's Day Massacre, the debacle over the console's graphics chipset and mitigating the astonishment and disgust over the Duke controller at Microsoft Japan—Robbie Bach, like Ed Fries, knew the launch marked the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end. Still, he and his team had accomplished what they set out to do. If Sony wanted to conquer the living room, it would have to go through Microsoft first.

"PlayStation 2 played movies," Bach says as he compares and contrasts game machines. "You had a hard drive in the Xbox and an Internet connection that was reliable. Xbox Live was the first serious, orchestrated online gaming service. But these were all precursors to what I think was the breakout in that space, which was PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. If we're talking about pivot points, Xbox and PlayStation 2 was the arrival, and PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and the Wii were the delivery point."