ON CHRISTMAS MORNING IN 1994, three-year-old Cailin Flaherty found The Lion King on CD-ROM under her tree. Her dad installed the game on the family's new Compaq Presario pre-loaded with Windows 95, only for the game to freeze every time Cailin tried to play. With his daughter in tears, Terry Flaherty contacted Disney repeatedly but received no solution to the problem. Terry, a specialist, troubleshooted the problem but came away baffled. Disgusted, he wrote a letter of complaint to Disney CEO and chairperson Michael Eisner saying he expected higher quality from Disney.

Flaherty wasn't the only upset parent. Expecting huge success for the title, which was also released on Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, Disney shipped over 300,000 copies of The Lion King for Windows 95 to retailers that fall. The company sold two-thirds of those, but in the days and weeks following Christmas, angry customers inundated Disney's technical support staff with calls and letters complaining that the game failed to run. Disney's initial response was to blame users: These neophyte parents were installing the game incorrectly, or their computer lacked the hardware to play. As complaints jammed phone lines and customers took their criticisms to the media, Disney changed its tune, adopting a humbler attitude and bulking up its anemic tech support staff from eight to around 50.

Microsoft technology evangelist Alex St. John wasn't surprised by the reaction, for two reasons. First, the whole debacle was sort of his fault. "There was a really brilliant kid, who at the time really drove me crazy, named Chris Hecker, who was working with a Microsoft engineer to produce WinG," St. John says.

WinG was a library of graphics routines to help game developers port their software from MS-DOS to Windows 3.1, but without the performance hitches associated with running games through Windows. Hecker had received the source code to id Software's Doom from the company's co-founder and legendary programmer John Carmack, and had worked on a Windows port of Doom he called WinDoom. The conversion was more a proof of concept than a functional game. It lacked features such as area maps, functionality for the Function keys—quick-save on F5 being a must-have for players on higher difficulties—and only ran "Knee-Deep in the Dead," Doom's first episode. Management thought WinG had potential and assigned St. John to help Hecker get the resources he needed to finish WinDoom and integrate WinG into more PC games. St. John's programming buddy, Craig Eisler, joined the ad hoc group and added or fixed compatibility with dozens of processors, graphics processors, and other hardware.

Until WinDoom emerged as something more than a tech demo, St. John knew he needed a showpiece title to win over consumers, and just as importantly, to convince game developers to leave DOS for the greener pasture of Windows development. "We talked Disney into putting Lion King on it by promising that we were going to promote it as a Windows 3.1 product for Christmas," he says. St. John also negotiated a deal with PC manufacturer Compaq to preload copies of The Lion King on its machines. "It shipped on a million Compaq Presarios in time for Christmas."

Of all the hardware Eisler reviewed for compatibility with WinG, one slipped by him: a brand-new hardware file, known as a driver, from Cirrus Logic, a semiconductor supplier who developed the driver specifically for Compaq's Presario computers. That driver came pre-loaded on over a million computers, the same machines kids like Cailin Flaherty attempted to play The Lion King on only to watch their game crash over and over again.

"It was a massive PR disaster and we all thought we were going to get fired because it was on us. We shipped it, and I talked Disney into it," St. John admits.

To St. John's astonishment, the only person at Microsoft who wasn't furious with him was Bill Gates. Quite the opposite: Gates marveled as suits from Disney crawled around his company talking about Microsoft and Windows. "He was like, 'What did we do to get this much attention from a real media company?'" St. John remembers.

After Compaq pushed out new drivers and Disney's lawyers receded from view, Microsoft's executives came back to St. John's group and asked what they needed to do game compatibility with Windows the right way.

The problem was the exact issue St. John, Eisler, and Engstrom hoped to address with DirectX, which had been in the works throughout 1995 but had not been included in the first release of Windows 95 due to the project's unsanctioned status. Compaq's new Presario PCs came pre-loaded with Windows 95 and updated graphics drivers that had not been tested with WinG. The Lion King's developers wrote it to depend on WinG. To fix the issue, Compaq had to roll out updated drivers.

St. John sort of expected the question, for the second reason the Lion King debacle hadn't fazed him: It was bound to happen sooner or later.

Over the next year, Microsoft's executives were giddy over the power of Windows 95. Previous versions of Windows were masks rather than true operating systems, a way to make MS-DOS more user-friendly to computer neophytes. Windows 95 would be different. It would still run DOS to ensure compatibility with older programs and hardware drivers, but requiring a 32-bit architecture would make Windows faster, slicker, and more user-friendly through inventions such as the Start menu, triggered by clicking the rectangular button in the lower-left corner of the screen from which users could find all of their programs with a few mouse clicks.

St. John had been involved on the multimedia side of Windows 95, and while he thought the OS had potential—though it was doing things Apple's Mac OS had done for years, like allowing filenames up to 255 characters—he thought Microsoft, as usual, had its priorities backwards. "Microsoft thought playing videos was the most exciting thing you could do with Windows," St. John told me in a previous interview. "I was in the strategy group that said you guys are out of your mind, that is the dumbest thing ever and Apple will kick your butts and they deserve to. Gaming is what people want to use their PCs for. If you really want to have Windows be the dominant operating system, it should be built around games."

Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom agreed. Like St. John, Eisler and Engstrom were technical evangelists with programming backgrounds. As a team, the three advocated Windows 95's multimedia capabilities and saw potential in the OS as a gaming platform that could compete with Sega and Nintendo. Tony Garcia and his team in the gaming group had found success publishing PC games, but had never considered the PC a true competitor to consoles like the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. While PC hardware was more advanced, demonstrable through multimedia tour de forces such as Doom and Myst, computer gamers were a passionate but small subset of players. The price of computer hardware and the obscure functionality of text-driven operating systems such as MS-DOS made the PC a powerful but inaccessible platform.

Microsoft's overarching goal in building and launching a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign for Windows 95 was to change the perception of the PC by providing a colorful and simple graphical interface beyond those offered by Windows 3.1 and competitors such as Apple. St. John, Eisler, and Engstrom knew more computers in homes equaled greater potential to sell more games.

Many projects Eisler inherited as a technical evangelist for Windows 95's multimedia suite capabilities had to do with streamlining communication between video cards, an emerging technology that would lift the burden of processing graphics from processors and offer more graphical capabilities, and the operating system.

Management, however, had no interest in furthering the company's investment in games. Compared to sales of operating systems and productivity software, even bestselling games such as Age of Empires amounted to pennies in a bucket overflowing with one-hundred-dollar bills. St. John, Eisler, and Engstrom went rogue in November 1994. Between sanctioned projects, they designed a set of tools that would help developers tap into Windows 95's resources. With Eisler as lead developer and Engstrom and St. John bringing their skills at evangelism to bear, they called their effort the Manhattan Project, named after the government program responsible for building the Atomic Bomb because they believed their toolset would drop a bomb on Japan's foothold in the industry.

"We had a glowing radiation logo for the prototype," St. John said, "and of course as soon as that got out and the press covered it, it caused a scandal. Microsoft PR said, 'You have got to change that. You cannot be using a radiation symbol and calling this thing 'The Manhattan Project.'"

The evangelists knew they faced an uphill battle. In December, Engstrom and Eisler put together a PowerPoint presentation while St. John brought several game developers to Microsoft. That meeting, along with several that St. John set up elsewhere, did not end well. "I was in charge of game compatibility with Windows 95, so I was working with all the DOS game developers to make sure the games worked better in Windows 95; that's where a lot of the relationships came from," he explained. "But when I said, 'Hey, would you guys consider making your next game on Windows?', they laughed at me."

One reason for the popularity of MS-DOS, besides its omnipresence, was it gave developers direct access to hardware like video cards, keyboards, and sound cards. Windows 95 would feature a protected memory model that restricted access. Lightening those restrictions was the group's second priority. Their priority was piquing the interest of developers. "I said, 'Well, what's the problem?'" St. John remembered, "and they told me, 'Your OS is fat, it's slow, it sucks up memory. Everything's just in the way, and it doesn't have the features we need.' I said, 'Well, what would I have to do in Windows to make it a better game environment?"

Eisler, St. John, and Engstrom worked on DirectX through the release of Windows 95 in August. Tony Garcia's games group lined up releases such as Fury3, a title that played well but turned few heads since Terminal Reality had designed it as a port of Terminal Velocity for Windows 95.

The Lion King's public faceplant received so much media attention that game developers became even more suspicious of Windows. That made the decision to stick with DOS easier, but not simple. For all of DOS's performance gains, it was still a difficult platform on which to make games. Developers had to test hundreds of combinations of hardware (this video card with that sound card; that mouse with that CD-ROM driver; this amount of memory with that gamepad) to confirm their game would run on as many types of computers as possible. Game consoles like the Super Nintendo were less powerful since users could not upgrade their hardware, but that drawback was also an advantage: If a game ran on one Super Nintendo, it would run on all of them.

St. John, Engstrom, and Eisler promised that DirectX would represent an evolutionary leap over WinG and DOS in two ways. First, DirectX would provide developers with libraries designed to handle tasks related to graphics, audio, and other hardware such as input. Instead of having to write dozens of configurations, Microsoft's libraries would act as translators. Second, by freeing up resources. Windows operated by getting and sending messages to hardware, such as searching for and responding to mouse clicks and keypresses, and updating the screen.

"Essentially, it's called DirectX because it was designed to bypass the operating system, to push Windows aside, get it out of memory, get rid of all the garbage competing with games for resources, and just let the games run," St. John explained. "A lot of the functionality [was based on] shutting down Windows' graphics system so games could talk to the video hardware, stopping Windows from paging memory to the hard drive so that games could run at a constant frame rate, and bypassing Windows' message queue so you could get real-time mouse input so you could actually control a first-person shooter like Doom."

To St. John, Eisler, and Engstrom, Doom was more than one of the most successful MS-DOS games of all time with over two million copies sold. It was the litmus test. "As soon as we started showing the game community that the most respected games not only could run well under Windows, but were running better than they did under DOS, we started gaining some momentum," St. John said. "It was Microsoft's initial willingness to shoulder the risk for top developers that helped establish a lot of the momentum."

CRAIG EISLER WAITED until his Christmas vacation in '94 to write code. As The Lion King's PC port combusted, Eisler, St. John, and Engstrom, began a mad sprint to have DirectX—dubbed "Game SDK" at the time to separate it from the generic "multimedia" term Microsoft used to describe other features of Windows 95—ready to unveil.

A toolset as innovative as what they envisioned called for a grand unveiling, and its trio of evangelists knew just the time and place: April 1995 at the Computer Game Developers Conference. Engstrom and St. John touted the project to video card manufacturers, who loved the idea of a programming interface guaranteed to be compatible with their chipsets. Engineers from ATI, S3, Sirrus Logic, and other manufacturers brought their latest video cards to Microsoft's campus and convened in Building 20's hardware lab with Eisler to help him test his code against DirectDraw, the graphics-focused slice of the interface. Eisler wrote other interfaces such as DirectSound for audio hardware, and DirectPlay to send and receive messages from peripherals like controllers, keyboards, and mice.

Three months later, Eisler emerged from Building 20 with a beta held together with spit and bubblegum. It only worked with ATI's Mach 64 video card and Creative Labs' latest SoundBlaster card, but it got the job done. Dragging after another all-nighter in the lab, Eisler dropped into Engstrom's Mazda RX7 and the duo raced down highway 405 at 120 mile per hour to drop the CDs containing the beta at a FedEx location that guaranteed delivery on Tuesday morning, the day of the conference.

During the conference, a reporter referred to Game SDK as DirectX, joking that it must stand for "Direct Access" since all the libraries started with Direct. St. John, Eisler, and Engstrom latched on to the name, and DirectX was born.

DirectX's coming-out party lent some legitimacy to the project, though version 1.0 would not be finished in time to make it a part of Windows 95 when the OS launched that August. Eisler and his friends kept grinding from April through September. By the fall, Eisler had gained 25 pounds and developed an ulcer, but version 1.0 was finished. Unfortunately, no developers used it for their games.

While Eisler kept coding, Engstrom and St. John pounded pavement. Two of the first stops on St. John's tour were Origin, co-founded by Ultima creator Richard Garriott, and id Software, creator of Doom. "I went and said, 'Look, we don't know what the hell we're doing. We want to make Windows run games, and we need your support. If you trust us with the source to your most popular games, we'll port them to Windows and hand them back to you. If you think the game runs well, you can publish it and keep all the money.'"

St. John's offer appealed to Garriott and id co-founder John Carmack. Garriott sent three engineers to work side-by-side with Eisler as he configured DirectX to work with Origin's games, and Carmack handed over the source code for Doom. That, St. John knew, was his group's golden ticket. "I inherited the relationship from Carmack from that WinG period," he explains.

Still in need of engineers to bulk up his squad of developers, he went to Gabe Newell, a producer on the first three releases of Windows. Newell agreed with game developers: Windows was unsuitable for games. That changed after id Software released Doom, software that, according to Newell's research, was installed on more personal computers than Windows. Newell believed a version of Doom running on Windows could convince users to move away from DOS and lent St. John one engineer. After that developer passed away suddenly, several others gradually found their way onto the project, including Robert Hess, Todd Laney, Marcus Andrews, Jim Geist, Fred Hommel, and Roger Weiss.

With Carmack's code and ideas mined from WinDoom, Microsoft's engineers developed Doom95, a more robust and complete port of id Software's bestseller. On the surface, Doom95 seems like a wrapper. Through it, players can load Doom, Doom II, or Final Doom. The real meat is found in Windows 95-exclusive features such as 640x480 resolution, double that of the DOS version, and easily customizable settings to run custom maps and set up multiplayer matches.

Like DirectX 1.0, Doom95 warranted a party in its honor. "Microsoft had the reputation of being a big boring enterprise company, the natural enemy to creative people who avoid that industry because they want to make games," St. John explained. "In order for Microsoft to have any credibility in this industry, we had to have a cooler, more relaxed, creative reputation, and be more approachable to people from that industry. The best way to do that is to throw a great party."

Going around Patty Stonesifer, then a vice president at Microsoft and the head of the Consumer Products Group, St. John commandeered a parking garage on-campus and turned it into a party zone. In one area, developers could play Doom over networked computers. Elsewhere, the heavy metal band GWAR played on a massive stage. Most of the garage was consumed by a haunted house with sections themed after the games and studios who, like id and Origin, had signed on to create games using DirectX. Id Software's section featured an eight-foot-tall vagina adorned with 100 penises hanging from strings.

"There was a guy with a four-foot-long schlong spraying blood and so forth," St. John recalled, "and I said, 'If we're gonna do this, Microsoft has to suck it up. This is the games industry. Let these guys do what they like. We're supporting an open market platform, we're not selling Nintendo [consoles] where we control what people make, and if people have the perception that that's what Microsoft wants to do, they're going to lose credibility immediately. This is us supporting the game industry, and they're here supporting us.'"

St. John thought the party was going great until he saw a group of Microsoft executives enter the haunted house. Anxious, he met them at the exit and approached one of the execs. "Hey, did you like the haunted house?"

"Oh, yeah," the executive said. "It was fantastic."

"Well," St. John said, "did you see the id room?"

"Yeah. They had a lot of monsters."

"Did you see what they were?"

"It was dark," the executive said, thinking. "I saw some stuff getting sprayed around. It was great!"

St. John took the plunge: "Did you see the eight-foot-tall vagina monster?"

"Oh, is that what that was?"

The main event was a video that played on a huge monitor. A scene from Doom faded in: computer room, bodies on the floor, flashing terminals. Then Bill Gates, who could not attend the party but agreed to St. John's request to appear in promotional materials, walked onto the scene wearing a duster and toting a shotgun, where he casually killed a zombie and explained why game developers should move on from DOS to Windows 95.

Gates listed reasons game developers should embrace DirectX and make games for Windows 95. In mid-speech, one of Doom's zombies ran in from one side. Gates turned, pumped the shotgun, and the zombie went down in a spray of blood. "Don't interrupt me," Gates deadpanned, then picked up where he left off.

"I'm the one behind the camera and who gave him that shitty script," recalls St. John. "All the Microsoft PR people didn't want him anywhere near a violent video game or carrying a shotgun. He overrode them and came and did it at my request, and all of Microsoft PR has hated me ever since then. Even though it's a terrible video, if you think about it, everybody at Microsoft who surrounded Bill opposed him doing that video, but he said, 'Fuck it, I'm doing it.'"

According to St. John, Stonesifer complained about the party to Gates. When Gates informed him of her displeasure, St. John braced, certain once again he was moments away from getting fired. "I heard it was a great party," Gates said, and moved on.

Doom95 and St. John's wild parties proved Eisler, Engstrom, and St. John correct. By the late '90s, few titles were released on DOS. Windows 95 had become the premiere destination for PC games. Engstrom, who passed away suddenly in 2020, was the first of the trio to turn his sights to the next obvious market to conquer: Console games. When Microsoft evangelist James Spahn set up a last-minute meeting with Sega's leadership in Japan, St. John wanted to beg off and go back to his hotel to sleep, but Engstrom pushed to meet with the developers so he could pitch them on building a console powered by DirectX.

"They're not going to make Windows game," Engstrom pointed out of Sega. "Let's try it."

"You're out of your fucking mind," St. John told him, but they took the meeting.

That conversation became a seed, one that wouldn't grow and bear fruit until years later.