In terms of games and graphic standards, Microsoft had recently gone through some heated and often acrimonious battles. The Developer Relations Group, particularly the trio of Alex St. John, Eric Engstrom, and Craig Eisler, had used every tactic available to them to push through the game enabling technology, DirectX. They had also fought battles over browser technology and competing graphics standards, which once again would be critical to games. They did this, in large part, to counter Apple’s dominance in multimedia, and to prevent Microsoft’s competitors from ultimately dominating living rooms all around the country. It was in some sense coincidental that games became their focus, but the work they did to support game development on Windows, especially after the launch of Windows 95, would have profound impact on the future of the PC game industry. and it would have a profound impact on the subject of this volume—Xbox.
In the aftermath of the Talisman/OpenGL vs. DirectX battles, and with Alex St. John’s departure (all of which, and more, are chronicled in the companion volume to this book, Game of X v.2) life and work at Microsoft largely returned to normal. “Normal” meant that the biggest perceived threat to Windows was Sun Microsystems and Java, and, although DirectX had prevailed and the games division was growing, video games and the rising success of PlayStation were mere blips appearing far in the periphery of Microsoft’s strategic radar.
“Normal,” however, was not for everyone. There were people who sought something that would kindle their passion, and some of those people found their passion and purpose in the area of games. And, as it had been with DirectX, the path forward involved competing visions and a good bit of trench warfare. How it all came about depends on who you talk to. “Success has many fathers…” and over the years some books and a multitude of articles have been written, often claiming to identify one person or a very small group as the “creators of the Xbox,” but in reality, there were many creators who often get overlooked, and others who had ideas for consoles, but never acted upon them.
My purpose in writing this book was always to tell the story from as many perspectives as I can, and the following narrative will sometimes present alternative points of view, based on how the people directly involved remember certain events that culminated in Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar bet.
Moving Forward with Games
Ed Fries
Ed Fries made his first forays into the game development in 1982 as a senior in high school. “I started working in BASIC but moved to assembly language when BASIC was too slow. I wrote a clone of the arcade game Space Wars and then a copy of Frogger that I called ‘Froggie’”. Froggie made its way through the bulletin boards and was noticed by a game company called ROMOX, who somehow tracked him down and made him a development deal. His first commercial game, Princess and Frog, came out just as he started college and was credited to “Eddy Fries.” Fries went on to create a Dig-Dug inspired game called Ant-Eater and another called Sea Chase, both of which came out on Atari 800 cartridges. His fourth game, Nitro, was never released because ROMOX (and a lot of other companies) went out of business in 1984.
Fries soon found gainful, non-game-related employment at Microsoft, and started a career that had nothing at all to do with games for the most part (see Bogus Software (Game of X v.2, pg 20). Ten years later, a chance encounter with a colleague at the airport changed all that and had a huge effect on Fries’ future, and arguably on the future of his employer—Microsoft. That’s when he learned about an open managerial position in the games division. The game side of Microsoft had never been a high priority for Microsoft, but when Ed Fries was offered a chance to head a division of his own after 10 years working in the Office software division, it was that open position in games that he requested, firing off a letter to Patty Stoneseifer, the head of the Consumer division, to express his interest in the open position. “My decision upset some of the executives, who had different plans for me. I got hauled into the offices of a couple of vice-presidents, and they told me I was committing career suicide. They said, ‘Why would you want to leave Office, one the most important parts of the company, to go work on something nobody cares about?’”
Fries had his reasons. He still retained his interest in games and the memories of being a game developer himself. That was one reason. But he also knew that in the game division he would be able to work without the intense scrutiny he would have to endure as the head of just about any other division. The thought of independence and creative freedom figured strongly into his decision, counterintuitive as it might have seemed to his superiors.
Ironically, it was increased attention that Tony Garcia (see also Game of X v.2 Chapter 9) credits with his decision to move on, essentially creating the opening for Fries to take over. “We were able to be nimble, we moved quickly, we grew fast, and I think it’s harder to do that kind of thing when you are also part of bigger initiatives that may not have the same agility. You know, it’s much more fun to work with the people that you’ve assembled—that whole team feeling—that part is the best part. Especially when you see people succeed and go on to do their own thing. That’s all very rewarding. Beyond that, it’s all politics that I’m just not interested.”
Garcia had gotten the ball rolling, and he had put together a great team, including Laura Fryer, Shane Kim, Bonnie Ross, Ed Ventura, John Kimmich, Shannon Loftis, and Jon Grande, all of whom continued to have long, successful careers at Microsoft and beyond. He had also tried to get some better titles done, working with proven developers like Larry Holland, who had designed games like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe for LucasArts, and with Jez San’s Argonaut Games, but their games didn’t pan out. Then Ed Ventura discovered Ensemble Studios and their game, Age of Empires, and brought them to the table with Microsoft. Before he left, Garcia worked out a deal, including ownership of the IP for Age of Empires, the game that finally put Microsoft on the map as a PC game company.
In March 1996, Fries took over the Entertainment Business Unit (EBU), which later became Microsoft Game Studios. At the time there were about 75 employees and an equal number of contractors, and Garcia had already left. Fries never even met his predecessor. He moved into an empty office with no remaining sense of its history. “Tony was like a ghost I never met.” Fries completed the contract with Ensemble and eventually negotiated the acquisition of the company, but he says, “I often get too much credit for Age of Empires. That was Tony and Stuart Moulder who put the deal together, even though I did complete the contract.”
Fries came into his new position with a genuine interest in games, what some people called a Jedi talent for listening and asking the right questions, and, honestly, he was a fan. When he spoke with game developers, they knew his interest was real. Moreover, Fries was a genuinely likeable guy, so no matter how much you wanted to hate Microsoft, you couldn’t feel that way about Ed. One of the first things Fries did was hit the road. “You know, I did what probably any gamer would do, which is, I went all over the world and met with all my heroes… game designers that I had the most respect for. I tried to put deals together with them, get them to work with us.”
The ultimate acquisition of Ensemble Studios and the successful launch of Age of Empires gave Microsoft a clear PC gaming success. Fries also helped with the transition of Flight Simulator developers, the Bruce Artwick Organization (BAO), onto the Microsoft campus and acquired FASA, along with Jordan Weisman and FASA’s Mech Warrior, Shadowrun, and Crimson Skies franchises. In addition, Fries helped both Chris Roberts and Chris Taylor start up their new companies, Digital Anvil (1996) and Gas Powered Games (1998) respectively.
Absorbing FASA
Microsoft’s acquisition of FASA, and Jordan Weisman along with it, was announced on January 7, 1999.
Weisman grew up in Chicago, and was severely dyslexic. He credits a second grade teacher for recognizing the problem at a time when it was not well understood, but even more, he credits Dungeons & Dragons directly, and also tangentially for inspiring him (or almost requiring him) to read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. “I had been given the tools to read because of the luck of having a good teacher, but it was almost physically painful. Not actually physically painful, but it sort of felt like it was physically painful, so you avoid it. Just naturally, you avoid it. And now all of a sudden there was something that I wanted, and there was no way around it except to read.”
Jordan Weisman
At college, Weisman was able to “tour” a $50 million ridge simulator that sparked his imagination. So he dropped out of school and began experimenting. “I was positive that I could reproduce that $50 million mainframe simulator by networking together Apple II computers.” There weren’t any networks to work with in 1979, so he began trying to connect Apple II computers together serially from their motherboards, “which was a really good way to fry motherboards.”
Fortunately, before too many motherboards had been crisped, he realized that he was on the wrong track with the Apple IIs, but that there was still a way to accomplish his goal of networked gaming. He refined his concept and approached investors, whose response he sums up as, “Let me get this straight. You’re a college dropout, never done anything, and you’re talking about network computers to create a virtual environment that people are going to buy tickets to… like they buy tickets to a movie to come play. So we think you’re just high.” So Weisman switched gears once again. “I thought if I started a pen and paper roleplaying company and I’d be rich overnight, and then use the funds from there to build the electronic thing I wanted to build.”
That was the beginning of FASA in 1980, where Weisman designed long-running franchises like Battletech, Shadowrun and a pen and paper Star Trek game. Fast forward to 1987: Now Weisman and his team believed it was time to revisit the original concept of networked games, so they started ESP… Environmental Simulations Project. They sank a lot of money into the project, which ultimately cost four times more than anticipated. They had to create their own network and graphics cards. “Only really naïve people would have tried it,” says Weisman. However, by the end of 1988 they had created one of the first networked multiplayer immersive environments based on BattleTech, and in 1989 opened the first public BattleTech center (in Chicago) with two more in Japan in 1990 and 1991. Then, in 1992, the Disney family, led by Tim Disney, bought the majority interest in the company “and then together we built a chain of those around the world.”
In 1996, Weisman and L. Ross Babcock founded FASA Interactive and Virtual World Entertainment as subsidiaries under the corporate entity Virtual World Entertainment Group. FASA Interactive published the PC game MechWarrior in 1998, and was subsequently purchased by Microsoft. Weisman and his whole team, at that point a part of Microsoft, moved from Chicago to Bellevue, Washington following the acquisition. Ed Fries is quoted in the press release: “‘The acquisition of FASA Interactive reflects our commitment to growing our business with a smaller portfolio of top-quality games,’ said Ed Fries, general manager of Microsoft’s games group. ‘The MechWarrior franchise is one of the best-selling series of PC games in history and is synonymous with groundbreaking technology and compelling gameplay. We’re excited to continue the growth of the BattleTech property as part of our portfolio.’”
http://news.microsoft.com/1999/01/07/microsoft-acquires-fasa-interactive/
No Mario for Bill
According to Weisman, his move to Microsoft might have been very brief. “I think I’d been at Microsoft less than three months or so, and we were having our first Bill review up at Division. You sweat bullets about those. And so every team was working to present their product. So he walked down the line and he saw each of the games that were in development, and then we sat down and it was just Bill, Robbie Bach and Ed Fries and myself, and a couple questions. And then he asked, ‘Well, why don’t we have a Mario? Where’s our iconic character? Like a Mario Bros.’ And he looked at Robbie, and Robbie looked at Ed, and Ed looked at me. Okay! And I turned to Bill and I said, ‘You can’t have one.’ I thought that would be an engaging way to tell Bill that he couldn’t have something but it turned out to be way pretentious. And he said, ‘What do you mean I can’t have one?’ I said, ‘Because we’re a PC game company, right?’ And I explained the difference, at the time, between PC games and console games. Over the years this has totally changed, but at the time PC games were always world centric versus console games that were character centric. And so I just did a couple of minutes explaining that, and he thought about it, and then said, ‘Oh okay, that makes sense.’ I figured it could have been a very short career at Microsoft to start with the sentence ‘You can’t have that.’”
FASA’s Rough Assimilation
Weisman became the creative director for the games studio, and so was not specifically leading the FASA team during the transition. However, he was involved and acutely aware of the challenges they faced. The main issue was the wide disparity between the game studio culture and the traditional development culture at Microsoft. At the time, he says, “Microsoft Games had kind of been the place that you put old developers out to pasture. It was a reward for good years of service in other divisions that you got to go play with games. And it was primarily people who liked to play games rather than people who knew how or were dedicated to making games.” Ed Fries was changing this situation, but Weisman further observes, “like anything in a big company, it doesn’t change overnight.” One difference he notes was that, in contrast to the game developers at FASA, the Microsoft people “didn’t live and breathe to make games.”
Another cultural shock was the argumentative nature of life at Microsoft, which Weisman explains. “Microsoft development culture was all about features. Different groups would go off and develop different features, and then the leaders of those groups would get together and argue. And I do mean argue. They’d have these long, drawn out battles, fighting for their features to be included in the product. You know, there’s a reason that Microsoft products feels like a grab bag full of features thrown together. Because that’s how they’re built.”
Game culture is different according to Weisman. “They start with a singular vision and often a singular vision holder, who then works in successive layers to build teams around that vision. And of course that vision changes over time as people contribute to it, but it is all about contributing to a singular vision. There isn’t a ‘Well, let’s do a first person shooter. You go do the movement system. You do the story. You do the combat system.’ And then you don’t get together and argue… otherwise it’s like a Frankenstein assembly of parts. So, it’s a fundamentally different way of approaching product development. One very design focus centric and the other very feature centric. And it took years to get the culture to kind of learn that.”
Weisman doesn’t fault Microsoft or Fries for the problems they faced. For one, these kinds of acquisitions between very different cultures were inherently complex. Nobody had bad intentions, but there was a learning curve, and what Fries and Weisman learned from the FASA experience would come in handy later on when one of Microsoft’s biggest game company acquisitions of another Chicago studio was on the line.
Reputation
In addition to misconceptions about the differences between PC games and consoles, there was the problem of perception. Games and business software had vastly different identities. They existed in diametrically opposed worlds, and the clash between them became evident soon after Ed Fries took over the EBU. While business products had acceptable, if unexciting names like Windows, Excel and Word, video games had names like Hellbender and Deadly Tide. At the time, the initial problems occurred with the games’ names, and less in the content. Fries says that the issue was about public perception and Microsoft’s reputation. “They knew we were never going to make the kind of money that they were making, and so their biggest fear about the games business was that we would somehow bring shame on the rest of Microsoft or somehow piss people off.”
In the case of Hellbender, people in the business units were concerned that having the word “hell” in the title would potentially offend people, even to the extent of having their products banned. “Will that make, say, the Catholic church ban all Microsoft products and be really expensive?”
The case of Deadly Tide is even more whacked. Both Steve Ballmer and the company’s head of marketing, Bob Herbold, came from Procter & Gamble, whose best-selling product was the laundry detergent Tide. Herbold, who had come more recently to Microsoft, was especially concerned about combining “dead” or “deadly” with the word “Tide”. And so they brought these two issues to Bill Gates. It was a small meeting with Gates, Ballmer, Herbold and Fries with his marketing team. It started out with a demo of the two games. “We tried not to put all the focus on the games,” says Fries. “When we’re done, we look around and Steve and Bob Herbold in particular do not look happy, but the first person to pipe in was Bill, of course. And Bill basically says, ‘They look great. I love the names. I think it’s fantastic. You guys keep doing what you’re doing.’ And you can just see Steve and Bob Herbold bite their lip. They have to say basically nothing because Bill jumped in first and said it was all great. And that was the end of the meeting. But it gives you a sense of why, if somebody says we’re going to publish Quake in roughly that same time, that was never going to happen. That took years of working our way up through edgier and edgier content until we were in a position to do something like that.”
While the game division steadily grew over time to nearly 500 people, the enterprise software divisions were still the primary focus of the company. However, while Fries was having success building up the public face of video games at Microsoft, people in diverse areas of the company were starting to talk about something new, something that everybody knew “could never happen here.” And yet it did.
Trouble Comes Easy
Before we continue our story, Fries offers an annectdote to illustrate how easy it is to make trouble, which he said happened all the time. “There’s actually something that happened years before. The very first version of Excel for Macintosh had a kind of copy protection built into it where it would write this hidden file onto the Mac that would check to make sure it’s there. And the guys who were working on it, were guys named Bill, Bob and Steve. They used their initials to make up the filename because they couldn’t think of anything better. And so the filename ended up being Bostbeval. So anyway, you could pronounce it as “boss be evil.” And so some preacher in Africa discovers this evil file—and it’s not even evil spelled like evil—but anyway, he discovers this evil file on his Mac. It’s a hidden file, and it says Bostbeval, and so, in his letter he writes that he’s discovered this hidden file, and then he renamed it from Bostbeval to “Bestbgood,” and then Excel wouldn’t work anymore. And so this was clearly the work of the devil, and he was telling all his parishioners not to support Microsoft products.”
