After Judgment Day, St. John and Engstrom took the DirectX show on the road… to Japan. Among their entourage were James Spahn, who was in DRG and also fluent in Japanese, and former Softimage business specialist Chris
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Phillips, now working for Microsoft. St. John describes Phillips as “Microsoft’s best-looking employee,” and James Plamondon says, “Chris Phillips was a consummate negotiator. So they’d send Alex in to punch people, or imply that they were going to get punched if they didn’t do what Alex wanted. Then they’d send in Chris Phillips and negotiate, and say, ‘Here’s the way to keep that maniac off your back, by doing these three things…”’ Phillips also did a lot of work in Japan.
Spahn was a half German and half Japanese former Sega employee who had grown up in Japan. He functioned both as a fellow evangelist and a translator for the group. Partnering with MSKK, Microsoft’s Japanese arm, they presented DirectX to Japanese developers. There were no massive haunted houses or crazy stunts, but there was a somewhat toned-down Wild West event and several successful presentations to large crowds of developers.
Japan was always a tough sell for PC games because their console companies were so entrenched and popular. However, DirectX did ultimately take hold in Japan.
Enter the Dragon
St. John tells a wonderful story on his blog about a last-minute meeting with Sega, arranged as they were heading for the airport at the end of their Japanese tour. The way he tells it, as they were headed out James Spahn noted that they had some hours to kill, so why not arrange a meeting with the president of Sega, Shoichiro Irimajiri? According to Chris Phillips and Eric Engstrom, the idea for the meeting came originally from Phillips the night before.
However it came about, a meeting was proposed, and it sounded like a great idea. The problem was, they had no real purpose, no justification for a meeting with Irimajiri. In St. John’s version, that’s when Engstrom blurted out, “Let’s try to sell them on shipping a DirectX OS with their next console.” In Phillips version, he told them the night before, “We should pitch them on doing something with us on the DX technology and putting it on Dreamcast.”
Whichever version of the story you prefer, they both end the same way… with them presenting this off-the-cuff idea to Iramajiri, and to their collective surprise, he liked it.
As Phillips observed later, they were all running on the “do whatever you want and ask forgiveness later” model. Engstrom remembers getting back to Microsoft and having his boss get in his face right away. Iramajiri had already called to talk about it, and nobody at Microsoft had any idea what he was referring to. Engstrom’s response was consistent with Phillips’ attitude. “Hey, if I’d asked, you’d have said ‘No’ or been culpable. This way you can just be happily surprised and reward me.”
Once the wheels started turning, Phillips was tapped to conduct the business negotiations. Looking back on the deal, he says, “The deal that I did with Sega was to basically produce this Dragon operating system with DirectX and Microsoft technologies for Dreamcast. And we were also putting our browser in it. They wanted a browser because Dreamcast had dial-up capability—so did Saturn, by the way—and they wanted to have the potential for online gaming. And they wanted to be able to have a device that could surf the web from your living room. Remember, by this time, we had bought WebTV as well. So that concept was already hyped. It would be a differentiator for the platform.”
The idea was not that the Microsoft OS would replace Sega’s altogether, but allow a different option that had access to Windows CE capabilities and to-DirectX so that they could write directly to the processor (to the metal) using C++ or C instead of C and in-line assembly.
This is how the Dragon OS for Sega’s Dreamcast became a serious possibility, and what followed were the business and technical work to make it happen. Ted Kummert’s CE division, already working on set-top boxes, was tapped to provide the core OS, and the project was quickly taken out of the hands of the DirectX team.
From St. John’s perspective, this was a travesty. “What happened was once it became clear to Microsoft that a huge strategic deal with Sega to build a console OS might actually be possible, Bob Muglia stepped in to ‘own’ the idea. The deal to build the Dragon OS was given to the CE team which was a struggling group with no real multimedia skills. CE was Microsoft’s original mobile OS, and it was going to be the OS for many presumed set top box projects that never panned out. The point was that nobody with our ambition and drive was chartered with delivering the technology for Sega and the lack of passion showed.” In any case, the Dreamcast deal was in the works, marking Microsoft’s first direct involvement in a game console, however minute.
Sega Negotiation Tactics
During the negotiations, Spahn says that Sega frequently changed negotiators. “That’s how they negotiated. They’d send a different executive out, or have us meet with someone else, and try to get a better deal.”
Spahn also tells a story of a brief, but unnerving, encounter with Sega chairman Okawa that occurred while he was waiting for another meeting to start. “He’s in this room on the eighth floor, which is all loungy type, old school meeting rooms. And so he’s sitting really low and deep in his chair, and he wants to talk to me. He’s got this really, really low voice. He’s sitting way back. He’s got these half-tinted sunglasses on… probably in his 80s, and he’s like, ‘James. You’ve got to make this partnership work.’ Something equivalent to that, but in a scarier voice, and that just threw me off. I wasn’t sure what to say. ‘Sir… Yes sir. We’ll make it happen.’”
In any case, with rotating negotiators, the process dragged on, each executive trying to get a better deal, telling a different story. The deal was eventually struck, and the project executed, and although it was not an overwhelming success, it did give Microsoft its first console experience and a glimpse into the console market.
Spahn was actually working with both the DirectX team and the WebTV team, and he observes that Microsoft was successful in producing a WebTV box that hooked up to Dreamcast. “It only shipped in Japan, but it was cool because it was a disk that turned your $300 Dreamcast into that other $300 box, which was WebTV. You could surf the web and it had all these services that would reformat the web page. There was nothing on the back end at that point on specific websites, so it would reformat all the text and images for your TV screen. But to be able to do that on disk was very cool.”
Spahn on Dragon OS
James Spahn had worked at Sega for three years and had a good relationship with some of their top developers like Yu Suzuki. He was at all of the Dragon OS meetings and spent a year in Japan helping with the integration process, particularly on the first title using the Microsoft OS, Sega Rally.
“It was a rocky relationship. The year I had to spend there was just for bug fixes and performance tweaking and all the stuff that I’m sure goes on in every new console title development, but having to work through Microsoft… I was feeling their pain, trying to get devs to change a feature, add a feature, or do any change.” According to Spahn, the Sega engineers didn’t really use the Dragon OS, “which is a shame. Strategically we tried to get some code into the hardware, but that didn’t work. The Dragon OS was optional, and it was one where everything starts in English, versus everything starting in Japanese, so for Japanese developer, obviously the Japanese is going to be easier.” He adds that Sega’s developers had no previous experience writing for Windows applications, which was an additional barrier. “So you get the performance hit. You get the English documentation first, and then you get APIs that you’re not familiar with. Having to choose between the two for a Japanese developer… not a hard decision.”
The Dreamcast OS Team
Mike Calligaro was part of the Dreamcast OS team from Microsoft. A member of the Windows CE division, he describes the project as he remembers it. “We’re going to have Sega of America design the hardware, and it was going to be 3Dfx, and it was going to be USB based – the input system was going to be USB, which was new at the time – actually it hadn’t really come out yet, but it was going to be the next big thing – and it turned out to be. And this would all be great.” However, the original Saturn team were writing their own OS for the Dreamcast. Their system worked with a different processor - the Hitachi-based SH4 - and a different graphics card. It also featured a different input system. “We learned that they had cancelled the one we were working on and swtiched to theirs from a press release. So now we’re not the operating system, we are one of the operating systems. There is the Windows CE based one and there is the Sega of Japan one.”
According to Calligaro, the negotiators on Microsoft’s side managed to work it out so that they got a cut of every disk, even if it didn’t use the CE version. “So we were getting paid, whether they shipped our stuff or not. Which was a good deal. But the worst of it was that our OS came with a connectivity model based on DirectPlay. It was like a precursor to Xbox Live. Our SDK used it, but they didn’t push it very much.”
Another little known, and apparently never used, feature of the Dreamcast OS is that it was built to run both Dreamcast and PC games. “We had the ability to write games for both PC and Dreamcast to play. In fact, my boss at the time did this DirectPlay demo for Bill Gates where they both got a controller and a spaceship. One was on a PC; one was on a dev board for the Dreamcast. And my manager shot Bill Gates down. I told him he should let him win. But he didn’t get reamed for it. Gates was a good sport”
Typically, people in management didn’t really seem to grasp what was most important about the work they’d done. As an example, Calligaro recounts an all-hands meeting that occured after the release of the Dreamcast in which the presenter says, “We’re making a game system, and our executive says that the best part of it is you can browse the internet with it.”
More Stories from Japan
While we’re on the subject of Microsoft in Japan, there are a few stories I was told. They have nothing much to do with the technology or with video games, but they’re amusing and provide more insight into the people who made this history.
The Official Conversationalist
St. John sometimes planned events for Bill Gates and acted as his “handler” for speaking engagements and appearances where it involved the game industry. He also entertained visiting game executives from Japan. In mid-1995, St. John hosted Masasyoshi Son, the billionaire founder of Sharp Electronics and SoftBank. Son was looking to start a strategic partnership with MSKK (Microsoft Japan) called GameBank. St. John introduced Son to some game developers and helped him understand more about the Western PC market.
Later, when Gates was scheduled to travel to Japan, Son asked that St. John come, too. Of course, traveling to Japan with Gates meant that he was also a handler, making sure that everything went right, but there was another job that he was asked to fill—that of the official conversationalist.
Gates didn’t travel with any security detail in those days, but he also didn’t want to get mobbed by people while in public. So, when they were at the Narita airport, he instructed St. John to carry on a very focused pseudo-conversation with him. It was the equivalent of someone reading a book or newspaper in a bus or train—a good way to keep people from finding an opening to engage.
Being Bill Gates
Having spent time with the man, St. John offered some observations about what it was like to be Bill Gates. “Playing the role of Bill Gates is an interesting job. When there are other people around, he has to be in that role. He was in a very formal, calculated social mode if he’s in a crowd of people, so everything was very formal. But if you were in an informal context, he was very different. He was funny. Bill’s got a sense of humor. He’s kind of mischievous, actually. He likes to cause trouble and so forth when he’s relaxed. So if you’re in that situation where it doesn’t have employees and executives around, he’s pretty light. But in other situations, you’re often dealing with somebody who is being very calculated about how they’re interacting with you.
“One of the things he seemed to like about me, I think, was that I didn’t care and I was just brutally honest, and I’d tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about and stuff like that. There was usually sort of a reality warp field around him of people trying to control all of his inputs all of the time. And so, boy, there were people who, if you tried to have a conversation/ interaction, they would jump in front of you, they would try to filter what you were saying, translate, interpret for you, be the voice for… whatever they could do to get between you and his ears. It was really annoying, and I think it annoyed him, too, a lot. So that’s when you saw him being mischievous. I think he enjoyed letting me have my leash, just because I drove them all nuts… his listening to me and responding to me irritated everybody who was trying to constantly jump in his ears.
“And so I do remember, in retrospect, I think he had a kind of good time having me around because I think he enjoyed that I was such a trouble maker and didn’t care if I was pissing off everybody around me. But he also wanted to hear what I had to say a lot of the time, so very often he would be picking my brain over things. What do you think of this, what do you think of that? He was very, very analytical… very eager to learn stuff. He was also very focused on efficient use of his time. So he kind of metered out his time. He tried to say and do everything as efficiently as he could. So you’d often have very systematic, clinical conversations with him when he was on a schedule.”
Windows World, Japan
James Spahn first met Bill Gates at a huge event in Japan called Windows World, which he says attracted more than a hundred thousand people. “We were at the Nilatani in Makani and Alex and I went up to Bill’s suite, just knocked on the door, and we invited ourselves in. Or Alex invited ourselves in. And I’m heads down trying to get the DirectX game demos ready for the keynote the next day, which is my job as an evangelist. But Alex is like, ‘Hey Bill, let’s go check it out.’ And it’s probably eleven or midnight—somewhere around there. So I asked all these guys to come back to the hotel and set everything up, and they did it pretty quick. And we showed him, and he was pretty floored. He had never seen anything like that running on Windows.”
Crazy Americans
Spahn also tells a story about trying to cancel rooms at an expensive Japanese hotel. “I was talking to the manager. It was like $300-400 a person. So this is a big chunk of change, and she’s like, ‘I’m really sorry.” And I’m saying, ‘We had to cancel for these reasons. It’s not our fault…’ putting out every excuse in the world, and then I forget if it was Eric or Alex, but they both started doing it. There was a lighter on the table, and they started putting the gas into one of their closed fist and then lighting it as they opened it. And it’s just something you probably wouldn’t do anywhere, normally, but especially in a conservative country like Japan in a really traditional place like a Japanese ryokan. They kept doing this and the manager kept looking and trying to talk and I’m trying to get our money, and she said, ‘It’s all good. You guys can go.’ And afterward, Eric and Alex said, ‘What was that?’ and I could have said, ‘Hey, you guys did your part. We don’t have to pay any cancellation fees.’ But I didn’t. I did not tell them anything, just ‘Guys, let’s go.’”
Tea Ceremony Revenge
Spahn was often the victim of practical jokes by St. John and Engstrom, but he had his ways of getting back at them. “On the last day in Kyoto, we took in this two-hour demonstration of tea ceremony and flower arrangement and all these kinds of things. I knew they hated Japanese macha—the really bitter green tea—and so on stage they were doing a tea ceremony demonstration and they needed two volunteers. And as soon as I hear that, I say, ‘Eric. Alex. Raise your hands.’ And quite promptly—boom—hands are up. They got called down to the stage. They have to sit Japanese style on their legs, which hurts, and then they get served this bitter green tea, and knowing those guys, normally they’d be like, ‘Screw this. I’m not doing this,’ but sitting on stage in a group of a couple hundred people, it’s pretty hard to say no and just go back to your seat. So they drank the bitter tea, hated it, and I forget what they did to me after that. Something to get me back, for sure.”
Dumb Americans
“There were so many times when we’d go into meetings and they would say something offensive,” says Spahn. “I remember the original project name for DirectX was the Manhattan Project. I didn’t think that would go over very well. So even if that did get cut out, or explained in some way, it was printed on the SDKs. So it would be like, ‘Oh, I hope you don’t know what that means.’ But some people noticed in Japan, and that’s where I would have to say, ‘Just dumb Americans. Don’t worry about it.’”