TONY GARCIA LEARNED SELF-AWARENESS THE hard way. He worked at Sirius Software writing 8-bit games for the Apple II and Commodore VIC-20, with support growing for the newer and more powerful Commodore 64. Garcia loved playing games almost as much as he enjoyed making them, and he was in good company.

Founded in the early 1980s, Sirius Software became known for PC games with high-quality graphics thanks largely to Nasir Gebelli, a genius coder whose first claim to fame was a port of arcade shoot-em-up Gorgon to the Apple II in June 1981. It was no small feat. Coin-op hardware was significantly faster than the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80, the three most popular PCs of the era. To the surprise of critics and players, Gebelli's conversion was better than the arcade source material, selling 23,000 copies over the next year, making it one of the highest-selling PC games to date and cementing the Apple II as a viable gaming platform.

Gorgon was one of eight games Gabelli coded for Sirius Software and one of 160 produced by Sirius Software in the three years since its founding. Garcia had to pinch himself. He created games for a living and worked alongside ace coders like Gabelli. Better still, Sirius was thriving, selling $11 million worth of software in 1983 alone. Unfortunately, he was aware of how little credit for that success could be attributed to him.

"I was working there as a programmer, but to be honest, I wasn't that good. It wasn't my strength," Garcia says.

The job still paid off. Garcia hung out with fellow coder Chuck Sommerville and maintained the friendship after Sommerville left Sirius for Epyx, developer and publisher of action and roleplaying games for a multitude of computing platforms. Then, in 1983, the North American video game market tanked, dealing a heavy blow to Sirius's financials. The second hit came in 1984 when 20th Century Fox, publishing partner for some of its titles, failed to pay over $18 million in owed royalties. Sirius went under that same year, and Garcia and the rest of the staff were laid off.

Six months later, Sommerville called Garcia and told him about an opening at Epyx. "I tested games Epyx was producing," he says. "I headed up the testing group for my first six to nine months. I touched every project. This was when Epyx was doing Summer Games, Winter Games; we even had a deal with Lucasfilm to distribute their games. I worked on Rescue on Fractalus, Ballblazer, where I would have our test team go through, find bugs, and report back to the developers."

Garcia felt more comfortable testing software and writing reports than he did writing code. He grew to know Epyx's publishing catalog so well that he accepted a position on the marketing team, where he critiqued titles from external studios that Epyx was considering publishing. Over time, he got to know developers from LucasArts, the game developer originally known as Lucasfilm Games. When Garcia contemplated what to do next, his contacts at LucasArts invited him to step into an associate producer role.

Once again, Garcia found himself outside his comfort zone. "It was very weird for me because I'd never had that kind of leadership role."

Akila Redmer, known to industry friends as AJ Redmer, left big shoes to fill. He'd served as director of development on Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, and Maniac Mansion, two adventure games that established LucasArts as a maker of premiere puzzle-solving, story-focused titles. Now Garcia had to fill a similar role on Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, an air combat simulation set in WWII, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which told a story independent of the films, and The Secret of Monkey Island, a tongue-in-cheek swashbuckling pirate story that, like the Indy game, combined puzzles and narrative progression.

On top of that, he worked on Skywalker Ranch, one of the most iconic locations in the world. He acclimated by getting to know the teams and enjoying the ride. "I've been blessed to work at a few places where you go, 'Wow. This is really clicking.' That was the first one, I think. It was this group of guys who were super-creative and talented. I just happened to be there and made a contribution."

It helped that Garcia was finding his niche in the games business. He was a shepherd, tending a flock of soon-to-be-legendary game designers like Noah Falstein, David Fox, and Ron Gilbert, by giving them space to be creative while he, Garcia, monitored production concerns like milestone schedules. But even in that context, he admits, "I still didn't know what the hell I was doing. It was pure and simple: heads down, figuring it out, doing the best you can. In those days, I was super-green and learning as I went, trying not to piss anybody off or act like I had all the answers."

When he didn't have the answers, he learned the fine art of asking the right questions to lead the studio's talent--some humble, some hotheaded--to the answer that made the most sense for their development schedule. "Always try to approach these people with respect, but with clear direction as well. You could say, 'I totally get what you're saying. However, if we do that, guess what will happen?' You walk them through the ramifications of a design direction, or a delay in the schedule, or a feature they want to add, that sort of thing. You had to keep everybody going in the same direction. I'd like to say we had all this stuff flowcharted, but we didn't. Stories and characters were fleshed out, but it was very fluid. What I would do was try to look a few days or weeks ahead and say, 'Where do we need to be to hit this milestone?' and 'Marketing needs some screenshots, but this isn't ready yet, so I need to get this guy to get that piece of art finished.'"

One of his favorite parts of the job was giving guests the grand tour of Skywalker Ranch. He grinned as he showed off jaw-dropping sights: the mixing and recording area where George Lucas and his team had readied the Star Wars films for theatrical releases; the Stag, a 300-seat theater where Lucas and production teams screened movies weeks or months prior to release; the parking lot, hidden belowground like the Batcave below Wayne Manor to preserve the Ranch's beautiful landscape; and Garcia's favorite hot spot, the on-site restaurant where world-class chefs prepared meals using ingredients harvested from the on-site garden.

"They come to Lucasfilm, I meet them, show them around, take them to lunch on the Ranch, and lunch on the Ranch is a big deal. It's amazing," Garcia says. "Blackened sea bass, roasted potatoes, and it's all handmade from scratch every morning. It's a really beautiful setting, and every once in a while you'd see a celebrity. I saw Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Huey Lewis. You're like, 'Oh my gosh, this is unreal.'"

A year into the job, Garcia hosted engineers from a small audio company in Canada. They were preparing to compete with Creative Labs by developing a sound card better than the SoundBlaster and wanted to get a feel for the games LucasArts made. A short time later, managers at Microsoft reached out to the company about acquiring their hardware. They also asked if the guys knew anyone experienced in marketing such equipment. They recommended Tony Garcia.

Garcia showed up for his first day unaware of just how big Microsoft was, not only in terms of its reputation, but in the vastness of its campus. He found his way to the hardware division where, as a program manager, he would bridge the gap between entertainment and business by overseeing the creation of products such as mice, keyboards, sound cards, and gaming peripherals like the Sidewinder joystick.

"In those days, they were selling a ton of hardware," Garcia recalls. "That group was very prolific, very buttoned-down with lots of experience in how to deal with vendors, chip makers, creating wafers, all that stuff. I was a fish out of water. I would do what I always did, which was just keep my head down and try to get to the finish line."

Garcia arrived at an inflection point for Microsoft. It was the early '90s, and the company still catered to enterprise-sized companies. They wanted recruits like Garcia to broaden their outreach to the consumer market. Garcia did his best to learn as he went, although the environment seemed ill-suited to collaboration: long corridors lined with offices, most doors closed so their occupants could work in peace.

But the toughest part of his gig was carrying out his mission to promote gaming hardware, a lucrative consumer market left untapped at Microsoft aside from an adaptation of Colossal Cave Adventure and Decathlon a decade earlier. One of his projects was to market the sound hardware made by the company who'd recommended him for his position to game developers so they would support it in their titles. "Parts of Microsoft thought it made sense," remembers Garcia. "'We're going to make an audio product, so let's make sure games will run on it.' But to be honest, their heart wasn't in it, and it showed."

Garcia started by speaking with developers in the consumer group. Outside parties would feel more confident supporting a new piece of hardware if they knew Microsoft's own teams used it. "Some people got it, some people who didn't," Garcia says of his attempt to drum up support. "The people who didn't seem to be a little more tied to the corporate culture of Microsoft: We sell Windows, we sell Excel, we sell Word. Some of us wanted to change that, but in those days, it was not a generally accepted idea."

Bruce Jacobsen was the exception to the rule. A manager within the consumer group, Jacobsen captained a small team charged with developing CD-ROM applications. Garcia explained what he was attempting to do with his sound card--roughly 75 percent complete by that point--and admitted his frustration at the reluctance other developers had shown to support the hardware. He brought up the Windows Entertainment Pack that rounded up Minesweeper and other products. "You know, those games are great, but I bet we can get some games from third parties."

Jacobsen grew thoughtful. "Oh, really?"

"Oh, yeah," Garcia said, growing animated. "Look, we've got amazing distribution. I think it would be really cool to go talk to a bunch of guys and put more games out."

"You're from the games industry?" Jacobsen asked. Garcia said he was. Jacobsen leaned forward and made his pitch: Microsoft had Flight Simulator, and it sold well, but it was more like a skunk works project off in its own corner, untethered to a group. What Microsoft needed was a games team. It would serve as an extension of the home entertainment group, and it needed someone with experience to get it off the ground. If Garcia was willing, Jacobsen would pull strings and appoint him as its manager.

"He made the request to have me transferred over, and that's how it started," Garcia says of his move from hardware to the consumer group. "That's how I navigated to my eventual position at Microsoft. I didn't pitch him. He pitched me."

TONY GARCIA'S SOUND CARD NEVER got off the ground. Engineers in the hardware division opted to source audio chips and build their own tech. That was fine by him. He had another priority: Establishing his games team.

The way to go, he decided, was to become a publisher first, as Microsoft had done with Flight Simulator. "There were a lot of guys who wanted to, but they would have to tell their boss at the Excel group, and their bosses would say, 'No way in hell are you going to work on these crazy games. I need you to make copy-paste work!' or whatever. Even if that weren't the case, the most talented games developer were outside of Microsoft."

Garcia knew two things for certain. Games like Asteroids and Missile Command had come from revered studios like Atari, and his first product as manager of the games teams had to make a splash. "I wanted it to be something that would make people go, 'Oh, I didn't know Windows could do that,' and I really wanted to put something out fast. That became Microsoft Arcade."

Microsoft Arcade collected five of Atari's classic coin-op titles: Asteroids, Battlezone, Centipede, Missile Command, and Tempest. Garcia received approval and Microsoft's lawyers secured licensing rights. Next, he had to find a programmer. He searched around and found a developer in Russia who agreed to port all five games into a single package. Garcia cautioned that he would have to work without the games' source. "We licensed from Atari, got the rights, but they wouldn't give us the code," explains Garcia.

The developer said that wouldn't be a problem and signed a contract for $150,000. Over the next nine months, he wrote each game from scratch. For four months, he spent hours watching, playing, and listening. During the fourth month, Garcia paid his way to Seattle so he could finish the games on-site. Garcia even bought a few of the cabinets for reference. "He would take translucent material, paste it over the screen, draw on top of it. It was something to watch," Garcia says.

Microsoft Arcade was something to play, too. Developers familiar with the game would come by to play or load a copy on their machine and rave about the compilation: the graphics, the sounds, even the algorithms that dictated how AI-controlled ships and rocks moved and behaved, it was all there. Response around the office galvanized Garcia so much that he paid the programmer a bonus. "The guy was just a machine," he says.

Microsoft Arcade turned even more heads outside the studio. "It sold like crazy and it ran on Windows," Garcia says. "Nobody had ever seen this before: An arcade game running on Windows, and we're talking Windows 3.-something, well before Windows 95."

The only knock critics had against the collection was its age. "I predict that this package will be an instant best seller," wrote an editor from Computer Gaming World, who proclaimed the five ports "nearly flawless" in a review in the December 1993 issue. "In a way that's a shame. This is almost an example of Jurassic Park-ware. The programmers have managed to recreate the dinosaurs in all their original glory. Like the lizards on the page and silver screen, these games are out of their own time. I have to think that there is a lot more game play available on the market today."

"None of these games are technically dazzling by today's Street Fighter II Turbo standards," agreed a writer at Entertainment Weekly in a review published almost one year later, an example of how mainstream media treated most game releases. However, the write-up continued, "What Arcade does give you is the rush of that rundown bowling alley or arcade where you got your first high score."

Thrilled as he was with the commercial success of Microsoft Arcade, Garcia knew the critics made a point. Arcade had released in a crowded year, fighting for shelf space and attention from juggernauts like Star Wars: X-WING, Myst, and Doom. It backed up his belief that the best game developers worked outside of Microsoft. Fortunately, he was in the middle of executing a plan to bring those developers into the fold.

"In parallel to Microsoft Arcade, I talked to everybody I knew," he says. "We were staffing up. I think we went from five to 30 people in the first year or so. Then we became 50, and by the time I left, we were about 150 people. All that ramp was to support our production environment: find developers, find titles, sign them, produce them in concert with their developers, and get them out the door."

Two of Garcia's hires were Ed Ventura and Tim Znamenacek. Like Garcia, Znamenacek came from the games industry, where he'd started by getting together with a few colleagues and creating the Illuminator, a clip-on light for Nintendo's Game Boy so players could see the black-and-green screen in dark environments. When a professional contact informed him Microsoft wanted to interview him for a position on their games team, he experienced more confusion than excitement. "At the time, being an Apple guy, I was thinking, Microsoft? Games? Do they really do games?" he recalls.

Ventura met his future boss at Garcia's house, where Garcia conducted the interview while waiting for an entertainment system he'd ordered for his home theater setup to arrive. "He's like, 'You've got to come to Microsoft and do this. We're going to do all this stuff,'" Ventura continues. Ventura talked with his wife before arriving at a decision. After designing the Illuminator, he'd moved on to a third-party developer for Nintendo, a difficult job in the early '90s when Nintendo gained infamy for imposing strict guidelines on its partners. "Being a third-party developer for Nintendo is challenging. Nintendo did the best, and then a few other companies like Konami and Capcom were really strong. Then you had all these other companies fighting for space. I decided to give Microsoft a try."

Znamenacek's hiring was more fortuitous. Microsoft and other companies sent representatives to universities to hire students for intern positions. Znamenacek did well and was invited to visit the campus for a second interview. "You don't really get to choose where you interview when you're an intern. They hire, like, 300 interns a summer for groups that have openings. It was a little bit by luck that I interviewed with games and with Word for Mac. I got offers from both and it was pretty hard to decide that one," he finishes with a laugh.

Interning as a quality assurance (QA) tester, Znamenacek returned for a second internship the following summer and was offered a job. He joined the games team full-time. By coincidence, he was playing Links 386 on his own time when he learned that Garcia had approached developer Access Software to bring the game from MS-DOS, its native operating system, to Windows. Znamenacek took point from there. "Some of the early games I worked on were the golf game, Flight Simulator, and a bunch of the Atari arcade games ported to Windows."

Access Software built a reputation as a developer of excellent golf titles with 1990's Links: The Challenge of Golf on MS-DOS and, two years later, the Commodore Amiga. Through Access's partnership with Microsoft, formalized in 1992, the game was renamed Microsoft Golf and offered more than a conversion from one OS to another. Microsoft Golf boasted an authentic re-creation of the Torrey Pines South Course assembled by Access programmers who played the course several times, videotaped it, and snapped over 500 aerial and ground photos. All that plus the DOS version's realistic physics, which Access had toiled over for 18 months, amounted to a 700-megabyte gorilla that was only available on CD-ROM, fulfilling Garcia's and Bruce Jacobsen's goals of facilitating greater consumer outreach through entertainment products.

Links developed into a semi-annual series and posted huge sales for Microsoft and Access, with the 1999 entry selling over 104,000 units in three months. Garcia inherited the partnership, and turned it over to Tim Znamenacek, who interfaced with the development team when they needed resources.

"We funded development and did all the QA," Znamenacek explains. "That's one thing that was special about Microsoft games early on and probably still today: We inherited QA discipline from other parts of the company. Some of that occurs today at game companies, but at the time, it was kind of rare. We were the only ones who spent a large amount of time in QA iterating on bugs to release a really stable product."

"We were huge on testing," Ed Ventura adds. "We'd drop things in water. We'd have things where you'd get prizes for how many bugs you had to log. People would come up with crazy ways to destroy products just so they could log bugs."

In 1992, Microsoft published over half a dozen games. Most, such as the assortment of titles in the Windows Entertainment Pack--then in its fourth iteration--were small. Microsoft Golf and Flight Simulator were the biggest of the bunch as far as development and sales. 1993 saw the release of Microsoft Arcade and another iteration of Microsoft Golf. A year later, a best-of anthology of games found in previous Entertainment bundles went to retail along with Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0. The kid's group, another subset of the home entertainment division, developed "edutainment" titles based on Scholastic's Magic School Bus books and TV show.

Garcia fought down nerves ahead of his first meeting with Bill Gates. He was one presenter out of many who joined the company co-founder in a conference room to detail what their groups had released and what they had slated for later that year. Every presenter had one hour, and most prepared slides they loaded into a projector. After 30 minutes of slides, Garcia switched off the projector and did something unorthodox: He invited Gates and others to spend the rest of his allotted time playing demos of games in development by Microsoft's partners. "That's what sold everybody," he remembers. "We showed the golf game from Access Software, Flight Simulator, and the last Entertainment Pack that was being wrapped up."

To his delight, Gates listened and asked questions. Then Garcia sat down while another manager in the home entertainment group loaded slides into the projector. "It was still feeling like we were part of an offering, not a division, if you will," he says. "Like, 'We're going to talk about this games stuff, this kid's stuff, and this other stuff.'"

The second meeting went over even better. Microsoft Arcade was on display, and so was a demo of a monster truck game sporting 3D graphics being made by Terminal Reality. Gates and the others were floored: For the first time, they were seeing a massive vehicle rendered in polygons and jouncing along with authentic physics. "The tires, the suspension--we'd never seen anything like that," Garcia recounts proudly. "That morphed into Midtown Madness with Angel Studios."

Garcia trotted out familiar faces, giving updates on Microsoft Golf and Flight Simulator. He also reported that talks were underway with several other developers, and presented Microsoft Arcade, which went over nearly as well as the monster truck prototype. Afterwards, Gates invited Garcia back to his office. Garcia followed him in a daze. He entered a large room filled with books and papers--full, but not messy. Gates took a seat behind his desk and asked more questions about PC games.

"My impression of him was a sponge of information," says Garcia. "He wanted to know as much as he could. He knew I came from the games industry, so I think he felt like the answers I would give him were from some experience. He asked me questions about the industry, the approach we were taking, stuff like that. I was floored that this guy was asking me questions and seemed genuinely interested, and that he seemed to quickly get what I was talking about."

By 1995, the games team was poised for its best year yet. Garcia's team was large and still growing. Production staff did everything from write and print off instruction manuals to design boxes for software to find writers, artists, or programmers if a development studio needed extra hands. Everyone in the group fit into Microsoft's corporate taxonomy. Tony Garcia was the general manager, who oversaw big-picture matters such as recruiting and partnerships. Program managers such as Stuart Moulder, who came to the burgeoning games team after several years at Sierra On-Line where he produced adventure franchises such as King's Quest, managed product managers like Ed Ventura and Tim Znamenacek, who themselves worked with sub-teams of testers working on games. Garcia also assigned product managers the duty of scouring the industry for potential developers to sign.

Managers like Ventura and Moulder were part and parcel of Microsoft's pitch to publishers. "For me to walk through somebody's door as a Microsoft guy but able to say, 'I came from the Nintendo side,' part of my job was trying to show them I was a gamer," Ventura says. "I played Atari games, Nintendo games. I'd say, 'That's what we're trying to do at Microsoft. We have great resources. There's going to be a lot of focus on games.'"

One of Ventura's biggest gets was Terminal Reality's Fury3, a Windows port of its well-received Terminal Velocity shooter featuring stunning 3D graphics and fast action. Over time, Fury3 took on unplanned significance for the games team. "We had a portfolio of studios, some you could debate whether they would make good games or not," Ventura says. "Fury3 was meant to be a filler game. It ended up being a star product because we were one of the last games to make the cut-off for Windows 95's launch."

Windows 95 represented Microsoft's coming-out party, proof positive it understood and could serve consumers just as capably as it had seen to the needs of businesses since its founding. Microsoft had spared no expense advertising the product's August 1995 launch. With a marketing budget of $500 million, marketing team lead Brad Chase cut a check for $12 million to license the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" as a theme song. For the big day, Chase arranged for Tonight Show host Jay Leno to share a stage with Bill Gates, had manufacturers create a 300-foot banner that hung from the CN Tower in Toronto, and worked with the City of New York to light up the Empire State building in red, green, and yellow.

"Windows 3.1 was no slouch," says Robbie Bach. "Tons of people used it, but in hindsight, it was a pain in the ass. Windows 95 was a seminal consumer event. If I think back to some of the things I did subsequently with Xbox, you'd say, 'Well, those things were really consumer-focused.' And yeah, that's true. But we weren't the first ones at Microsoft to have done something like that. If you're being accurate historically, you've got to look at Brad Chase and the Windows team for hitting that mark."

Chase's work paid off. PC manufacturers such as Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq built readymade machines that ran on Windows 95, which Microsoft and the manufacturers promoted as the easiest-to-use OS yet. Games were the best way to catch the eyes of consumers. Fury3 landed on shelves on August 31, one week after Windows 95, making it the OS's first commercial game. (The first game was Hover!, a futuristic-spaceships-meet-bumper-cars game released as part of Windows 95.)

While Fury3 failed to resonate with critics, identifying it as a reskin of Terminal Velocity for Windows with sharper graphics, it manifested Microsoft's desire to show players--and, it hoped, developers--how straightforward gaming on Windows 95 was compared to DOS. Using DOS, players had to be savvy enough to create boot disks that disabled unnecessary hardware to free up memory for the game to run, and understand esoteric concepts like hardware interrupts to configure sound and video hardware. To play Fury3, all they needed was a copy of Windows 95 and a CD-ROM drive. From there, they would click install, wait for the files to copy over to their hard drives, and double-click the icon to play.

Fury3's commercial success did not go unnoticed by Bill Gates. Tony Garcia knew Microsoft's boss got why computer games were important for Windows. Steve Ballmer, the company's president and Gates's righthand man, was less sure. "Steve did not think it made sense to get into this space," Garcia admits. "He didn't see the business model, or if he did, he didn't have faith in it. We were up against a little bit of headwinds."

Not only did Gates appreciate what games brought to Microsoft, he saw building a PC-gaming empire as the first step to reaching an even larger demographic. "When I met with Bill for the first time, he wanted Windows on TVs," Garcia recalls. "Consoles weren't on anyone's mind at the time. The mission was, eventually, have the operating system and software running on consumer devices."

Gates, Garcia, and his team held a minority opinion. Gaming was a piece of consumer strategy, and a relatively tiny piece when stacked up against other consumer-facing products like Microsoft Encarta and a fleet of other CD-ROM software the company pumped into the market. "There was a bit of a separation in culture at first," admits Znamenacek. "We were gamers trying to build games. The rest of the company was like, 'Hey, we're building serious products.'"

"We were not the most-liked group at Microsoft," agrees Ventura, who came in as employee number 36 on the games team--a small slice of Microsoft at around 100 employees. "Everyone was all serious about Excel, Word, and operating systems. We were the group that made people say, 'Why are we wasting our time?' And that's how the industry treated us, too. Microsoft was a strong company, but developers still weren't interested in talking to us."

No matter where the gamers turned, someone at Microsoft reminded them, in grandiose ways and small, of their importance to the company's bottom line. That reputation hung over the team, following them like a storm cloud. During a demonstration in 1999, by which time the games team had been formalized as the games group and employed over 500 developers, the marketing manager of the games division talked of future plans. Then she went on a tangent. "The thing you have to understand," she said, "is that games are the gnat on the fly's ass on the rhino of Microsoft."

John Howard, a senior developer who joined the company after Microsoft acquired FASA, the studio where he'd been a lead designer, recalls frissons of embarrassment, incredulity, and offense at her words. "In retrospect, you go, 'All right, you shouldn't have said that.' But people weren't up in arms about it. It was confirmation of the idea that we were this pirate band. Culturally, we were different from the rest of Microsoft."

Garcia and the others shrugged off snide looks and remarks. Their job was to diversify Microsoft's portfolio of development studios, and they performed with alacrity. In December 1995, Garcia headed negotiations to acquire the Bruce Artwick Organization, makers of Microsoft Flight Simulator, and moved all but two of the 30-developer studio from Champaign, Illinois, to Microsoft's campus, giving the company its first dedicated, internal development team.

"Again, I say with all humility that I didn't know what the hell I was doing," he says. "I was still in my 20s and here I was acquiring a company. How do you do that?"

Assimilating an external partner into Microsoft was a bold step for the gaming team. "Revenue was very strong for our group," Garcia continues. "Again, set against the backdrop of Microsoft making billions: Who cared? But for me and for the consumer division, it was an anchor. It was super-important that we maintain a release schedule and the tech keep improving. The only way to do that was to bring them internal."

Although Flight Simulator kept its status as the company's most profitable game-nee-simulation for several years, Garcia's developers continued searching for their next big core title. "My line of business was to go out and find action, adventure, and strategy games, 'core' games for gamers," Stuart Moulder explains. "We had some hits and misses, but the big hit was Age of Empires with Ensemble Studios."