Championships aren’t won on SportsCenter.
They’re not won by a single player, a single game or even in a single season. Championships are won through years of experience, hard-work, planning, scouting, recruiting, practice, analysis, financial investment, persistence and determination.
Like successful sports teams, successful businesses and products don’t happen overnight. Nor are they the result of one, or even a small number of peoples’ ideas, work, leadership or creativity. We all know this in our hearts, so why are we so quick to eulogize (or vilify) the heroes manufactured by the media?
Here’s why.
Most of what goes into winning a championship, or birthing a new business or creating an innovative product is boring. It lacks the drama, the conflict and the heroics that sells papers, magazines and clicks. The media craves dramatic characters, soundbites and a good ol’ fashioned bar fight.
Stories that don’t fit a marketable narrative structure, find the trashcan quickly. This leaves fans, followers and fanatics little insight to how these businesses or products came to be, how they navigate the critical challenges or the breadth of the team behind them.
Just 19 months and 1 day elapsed between the day the Xbox project was approved and it was on store shelves across the U.S. By any standard, it was a massive accomplishment – birthing 3 new billion dollar businesses for Microsoft and challenging entrenched rivals.
Xbox wasn’t simply one of the fastest-to-shelf “version 1” products in Microsoft’s history, it remains the fastest business to reach a billion dollars in sales. The iPod, considered the most successful consumer electronics product of all time, launched just one month before of the original Xbox, but would take 4 years before it overtook our installed base.
Halo, a game that the media universally criticized at its first E3 appearance would defy critics to become a $5 billion dollar franchise. Bungie’s first 3 installments would rack up nearly 250,000 years of gameplay and over 20 billion battles on Xbox Live.
Xbox Live connected millions of gamers together across the globe, birthing a third billion dollar business – and it even won an Emmy. It would take Nintendo and Sony over a decade to catch up with the work that the Xbox team did to lead the industry towards a connected future and to make online gaming a seamless experience.
These successes weren’t accidental. The team, while enormously talented, incredibly committed and ruthlessly focused started with a detailed plan and a stacked deck.
As a kid growing up on videogames, I read everything that I could get my hands on. Unlike my friends, my childhood hero was not Neil Armstrong, but Nolan Bushnell. There were a few books written, but in truth, the category had yet to be taken very seriously by anyone. On top of this, Japan was the “Hollywood” of the industry. The history of videogames, for a 12 year old fanboy without Internet was sparse.
Most of what eventually did get written about the early days were written well after the fact and starred only a few very public players.
These first generation consoles were designed by dozens of engineers and games were created by 2-5 people. By the time Xbox would be delivered in 2001, over 10,000 people from more than 50 companies were involved in getting the console and launch titles to shelf.
Be assured that this origin story does not fit neatly into 140 characters.
When we started the Xbox project in 1999, I proposed the idea of having a writer on staff to memorialize our journey. Having been involved in several early Internet efforts at Microsoft, I knew that it would be near-impossible to reconstruct the quest after the fact.
My peers rejected the idea, arguing that it may compromise our strategy, could distract the team or was rooted in egotistical motive. Knowing there would be more important battles to win with this new team, I moved past the decision. As a result, we allowed much of the history to evaporate.
15 years later, Rusel approached me with the idea of his new book. As a longtime historian of gaming, I knew that his interest and intentions were sincere, so I took the call. He expressed that the few attempts to capture the story behind Xbox came up short.
He told me that he wanted to tell the story from the beginning, where the taproot of the narrative was DirectX. The fan in him experienced the evolution from Flight Simulator to Halo and the historian knew that there was much more to the story.
After leaving Microsoft, I had declined all requests from journalists. To me, the media as a necessary evil and something I never enjoyed. It was especially difficult working with media and seeing our success, or failure be credited repeatedly to a very small number of people.
As the proverb goes, “After the game, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.” To me, nothing rings more true.
The team is the heart and soul of any product, brand or business. And somehow, our team always managed to get marginalized by the press. Add memory bias and PR spin into the mix and the story that shoots out the other end is about as honest as a Hostess Twinkie.
So, I made a deal with Rusel. I told him I would participate exclusively under the condition that he invite a couple dozen (unknown to media) team members to participate in the book. I urged him to gather diverse perspectives, and give others the chance to share their stories too.
And, after 3 years, here it is. Two massive volumes with stories, insights and details from nearly 100 contributors that helped create the Xbox.
An avid reader, I can’t recall ever reading a book quite like this before.
I was definitely too close to the topic fully enjoy it as a new reader. As I fact checked the first draft, something frustrated me about the book. After the first 200 pages or so, I found that frustration transforming into something that I really came to enjoy and appreciate.
You see, the story of Xbox doesn’t all fit together in a neat, tidy package. It’s not a typical 3 act narrative or 12 stage hero’s journey. It’s rough. Messy. It’s littered with unresolved conflicts and contradictory statements. And, it provides stage to some strong opinions and selective memories without judgement or rebuttal.
That grit is a real part of any team or quest. There is internal strife, frustrations and heartache that contributes to the creative process. There are perspectives that don’t align (and may never). There are opinions and players which veer off of the gravitas of the effort and misfits that try to sabotage others’ efforts. Most writers and editors will painstakingly filter these elements out of the story, transforming “reality” into a “good read”.
Thank you Rusel, not just for hunting patiently for these details and grit, but for having the courage, decency and respect for leaving these messy details in.
For each of the many personalities and players exposed in this book, there were dozens of others not named. When I said we started with a stacked deck, I was also referring to a lot of players and roles barely even mentioned here - there would be no Xbox without these key contributors as well.
First, we must thank Bill, Steve and Paul for creating a company and a culture that celebrated risk-taking, was unafraid to reinvent itself, dove fearlessly into new categories and hired world-class talent. The chance that they took on this newly formed team might have happened on February 14th, but the spirit that enabled that decision was decades in the making.
While DirectX and Microsoft Games Studios may have paved many of the direct roads leading to the launch of Xbox, we must also acknowledge the creative minds across Systems, Research, Services, Hardware and Applications that contributed code, patents, ideas and key talent to bring Xbox to life.
We also must celebrate the oft overlooked supporting cast of Legal, Finance, Operations, Manufacturing, HR, Administration and Sales. Unlike a true “startup,” this fledgling product team was able to rely on decades of experience, knowledge and insight from these rock-solid organizations who were nimble enough to match our cadence.
Finally, our partners. While we designed Xbox, the software and the services, Flextronics and Foxconn manufactured it. The core processing was powered by chips by Intel and Nvidia. Microsoft promoted it, but Best Buy, GameStop, EB, Target and WalMart actually sold it. Of course there were dozens more companies that lended their expertise to our plan as well.
Most importantly to our success was the game creators. People don’t buy a console because of what it can do, they buy it for the games it plays. Thousands of amazing game creators brought their visions, stories, puzzles, characters and challenges to life on Xbox. We just gave them the canvas. Backing these creative teams were dozens of publishers that took huge financial risks not just on these creators but also our first-generation platform.
It was an honor to be part of the amazing Xbox family and to be invited to share some of my memories about the journey we all shared for this book. It was fun to be reminded of some of these great times, tough mistakes and unforgettable personalities.
Never once did I feel that what we were doing was perfect, but I always believed it was magic. It was the passion of the many incredible people in these pages that made Xbox magic. Thank you all.
J Allard
(HiroProtagonist)