Windows Entertainment Pack 1
Tony Garcia came to Microsoft in 1991 after having worked previously at several game companies, most recently as a producer at LucasArts. Garcia was originally hired to work on the Windows Sound System, Microsoft’s first sound card for computers. According to Garcia, Microsoft’s hope was to incorporate sound into business software, but he was hired because Microsoft knew that sound systems were already an important aspect of games, so they needed a “game guy”. Even so, Garcia says, “Microsoft’s main objective was to introduce audio as a concept onto the desktop, so you could cross over from games into productivity applications like Excel and Word and do voice annotation and stuff like that.”
This idea of voice annotations in business applications prompted Garcia to take liberties with the Microsoft mouse. “I took one of the Microsoft mice and I cut it open and I integrated a microphone into it and created this little dongle that you would plug into, between the RS232 port and the sound card microphone input, and so literally, with this small piece of software, you would lift up the mouse to your mouth, where the microphone was, you’d click the button to start recording, you would make your voice note, you would release the button, and it would auto-embed into your document.” Garcia patented this concept.
Part of Garcia’s early work was to evangelize the sound card both internally at Microsoft and externally to game developers. In terms of Microsoft’s entry into the world of games and multimedia, this was early, in the Windows 3.1 era, and about the only game Microsoft was known for at the time was Flight Simulator. When the Windows Sound System 1.0 shipped in 1992, Garcia had become familiar with the essentially nonexistent state of games at Microsoft, and he wanted to do something about it. “I suggested that we should get focused around games because it was a great way to lure people onto Windows and get them using it in places other than the desktop.” He found support from Bruce Jacobson, who at the time was one of the head managers in the consumer group. “Bruce got it from day one. They gave me five people, and that’s how the Games Division (initially called the Entertainment Business Unit or EBU) started inside of Microsoft.” At the time, other than Flight Simulator, Microsoft had little to show beyond little games like Minesweeper and Solitaire.
With such a small team, it was clear that they needed to find third party developers to support Windows, and also to build up a marketing team and distribution channels. Garcia worked as the head of the games group for nearly five years, slowly building the team from five people to about 150 full-time employees and outside contractors, and making positive steps toward a gaming presence at Microsoft. “We decided this will be a slow burn. This will take some time, but there are things that we can leverage that nobody else could back in the day. And that was monster distribution, huge demand—anything Microsoft. Anything that we were doing had a great amount of visibility and to some degree, demand and desire for. So we leveraged the hell out of that. So you’d be surprised at the kinds of numbers we did with these little games.”
Like all division heads, he was required to report and do internal reviews with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. “Bill got it,” says Garcia. “He was such a quick study on this stuff, and he saw that what we were doing was essential ly enabling Windows users to think beyond just the desktop and think the living room. Think entertainment. Think media. And so he really got behind us and supported us in the very early days.”
Is This a Real Job?
One of Garcia’s early employees was Kathie Flood, already a four-year Microsoft veteran who had spent two years in operating systems and two years in an eight-person team working on interactive technologies. “And we’d talk about games, but we mostly used them to look at the user interfaces. So I got assigned to play Wolfenstein for example. And I couldn’t play it. I eventually had to go to my boss because I could shoot the Nazis, but I couldn’t shoot the dogs.” In addition to studying user interfaces, Flood’s group was envisioning online communities and looking at creating a 3D online world. “We had a little town, and we built a little King Dome where you could pick out Seahawks tickets, and we built a little Elliott Bay Book Store buy your books online, and looked at how you’d navigate inside the bookstore.”
When Flood was “re-orged” into what she called the “itsy-bitzy game group,” she asked her new boss, “‘Do they still pay me for this?’ We genuinely didn’t know,” she adds. “‘Is this a demotion? Basically is this a real job?’ And he just laughed and said, ‘They’re going to pay you. You like soccer, we’re going to put you on that.’” Because she liked soccer, all of a sudden she was a game designer, and getting paid to do it.
Although Flood played real-life soccer, she knew nothing about game design. Fortunately for her, work had already been done by an outside development group, but they had failed to meet their deadlines, so she took the code and working with “two and a half programmers, a tester, and a localizer” she was given three months to complete the game and localize it in six languages. The result was Soccer 1.0. “It was terrible,” she admits, “but it made money because it was in all different languages and it was shipped along with Works.”
A New Concept—Fun
Kiki McMillan came to Microsoft as a technical writer in 1990, and, like Flood, she found herself working in the games group in 1994. She talks about going to the company store. “It was Word and Excel, and DOS stuff, and then they had the track and field game, which was the dumbest game. But they encouraged us to play these little games in the lead-up to releasing operating systems because they helped expose if there were problems.”
Typically, a lot of projects were started but never released, such as a Hockey game and a women’s soccer game (“Like they were really going to consider that back then,” remarks Flood.) But Microsoft wanted the sports games to make money, thinking that they should be able to attain the kinds of revenues that EA’s perennial hit, the Madden franchise. So the team pushed back, claiming that the only way to get even close to Madden numbers was to publish their games across multiple platforms, at the very least on Windows and PlayStation. But they were told no. Microsoft would only publish games on the Windows platform. Once again pushing back, the designers would ask, “Do you want to make money or use games as a strategic way to push Microsoft platforms?” And the answer was, “Both.” And so Microsoft games ran only on PC platforms, with few exceptions, until Xbox provided a console that was also a Microsoft platform.
Another problem with the early games efforts came from trying to fit standard Microsoft methodology onto game development. McMillan says, “when I worked on Works, we went through a whole task force and talked about how we could refine preproduction, production, and all that other stuff. And we tried to do it in the games group, and it was impossible because we were trying to take a very disciplined software development process and apply it to games. The problem was that games are not like productivity applications. They are subjective, and often require a lot of iteration in the development process to get the best results, and this was especially true when most of the people doing the work had little to no previous experience. “When we came up with our development plan for Soccer,” says Flood, “that very first game, we checked all the items off, and all the stuff was in… kind of. But we knew it wasn’t fun. If you’re making something bold in Word, nobody says, ‘Was it fun? Did you enjoy it?’ It either works or it doesn’t.” As it turns out, fun was a new concept at Microsoft. So was the concept of a game designer. There was no such category, and it was up to the program managers to fill that role.
Growing the Business
Even with support in high places, it was generally believed at Microsoft that games were peripheral to their central mission. For the most part, games were seen as an outlier, and not a core business. In spite of that, and even despite the general lack of support for the game projects, the games division grew. They acquired Access Software, makers of the Links golf games, around 1994, and Flight Simulator developers, the Bruce Artwick Organization (BAO), in 1995.
“It became clear that the Flight Sim guys were just tired of trying to run the company on their own, and they had been approached by Sierra On-Line,” says Garcia. “And so, out of courtesy, they called us up and they told me, ‘Hey, I just want to tell you that we’ve had a pretty compelling offer from Sierra, and we’re at this stage now, and…’ Bells went off in my head! Oh my god. What are you talking about? ‘Oh don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll still let you publish it.’ Aahh. I don’t think so. So basically we got in there and we derailed that deal by giving them our own deal.”
The funniest part of the story, according to Garcia, is when he had to go tell the Flight Simulator team in Champlain, Illinois that they were now part of Microsoft. “So I go to Champlain with my legal guy and my HR person and we just show up. We tried to do it low key. We thought about what do we say and how do we do it, and all of that. But then, when the time came to let the employees know, the founders of the company decided that they’re going to get everybody together at a pancake house that’s around the corner, where I guess they would take people every once in a while.
“So everybody gets in their cars and they go to the pancake house, and then they just basically say, ‘So, are you guys going to tell them?’ Without any prep at all. My face went white, and they said, ‘We just think it would be better if you just let everybody know.’ So in that setting, I had to stand up in front of… it must have been 40 or 50 people, all working at this company, and basically say, ‘We’re happy to announce that we’ve concluded negotiations to acquire the company and we want to welcome you all to Microsoft.’
“Now it was their turn, and their faces went white and all the mumble, mumble, mumble started out, and people start thinking, ‘Do I have a job?’ And for the three days after that we met with every single person to try to convince them to come—not just to become Microsoft employees—they had to come to Redmond. We were relocating everyone. And that took a lot of doing. The happy ending is that, of the 40 plus people that we tried to move over, almost all of them made the move, and many of them still live here.” Ultimately, the BAO people became the nucleus of Microsoft’s Simulation Group, which is responsible for the popular Forza racing franchise and other simulation-based games.
Meanwhile, developers like Flood, McMillan, and Russ Glaeser, who came over with BAO, continued to soldier on with little funding, and often without playtesting facilities, creating several entertainment and arcade packs, Close Combat, Deadly Tide, Fury3, Monster Truck Madness (1&2), and many other games between 1995 and 1999.
Before leaving Microsoft in 1996, Garcia began work with Ensemble Studios and set the stage for distributing Age of Empires, Microsoft’s first hit game.
Meanwhile, St. John and company were busy working in parallel to proselytize games at Microsoft, using their DRG tactics to push the envelope even further.