While the small proto-xBox team was exploring their concept of a game-centric logo program, other teams at Microsoft were exploring different technologies. This was business as usual.
Fahrenheit
At some point, SGI decided they needed to develop an Intel based workstation platform to compete with faster and faster PCs from companies like Dell and HP, and according to Jay Torborg, they formed a joint development project with Microsoft. The motivation for the collaboration was essentially two-fold. “The concept was to try to do a really high-level abstraction of 3D, to make it easier to do really powerful 3D applications without really understanding how all the 3D functionality worked. And the other big aspect of it was to try to mend fences with Silicon Graphics, mostly because of Direct3D being competition to OpenGL, and a lack of support for OpenGL in general. So this was a way of trying to mend fences with Silicon Graphics and get them to adopt the Windows platform and move forward with that in their low-end technical workstations.”
Fahrenheit was intended to be a new high-level 3D application, “where getting the last bit of performance was less important than fast application development,” and was to be based on ongoing efforts already underway at SGI and Microsoft. However, Torborg expressed disappointment with the progress of the initiative. “I’m sure there were some people on the team who were really enthusiastic, but for the most part the engineers at Microsoft weren’t super enthusiastic about the idea. Certainly the direct managers were a little bit reluctant to be working on it. So it didn’t really ever get significant traction, and ultimately, in part because Silicon Graphics ran into so many problems, and the fact that there wasn’t really that much enthusiasm for it, either in the development group or from application developers—third-party developers—it ended up getting canceled.”
Ty Graham only remembers Fahrenheit because he and Kevin Bachus had been given the task of running the concept out to the marketing teams and executives at various hardware companies, particularly those creating graphics cards. “We had to tell them why it’s ok. I can’t even remember what we came up with.”
Typically, Alex St. John has a completely contrary view of Fahrenheit. Accurate or not, here’s what he has to say about it:
“After the multimedia retreat, D3D had won. That “BLAM” email is the declaration of victory because the multimedia retreat (Game of X v.2 chapter 24) discredited the Talisman people and bought Craig and Eric time to entangle Internet Explorer with DirectX. That left the OpenGL team, which was a different kind of obstacle because they were really battling over control of the 3D graphic driver layer. Obviously Jay had them lobbying him constantly as well. Fahrenheit was the result of that twisted alliance.
“Jay liked adopting Direct3D as the carrier for Talisman initially because it was not an open standard API, so he was free to mutate it to support Talisman. I don’t know how the discussion about Fahrenheit began, but clearly somewhere between the MSFT OGL team and SGI it was realized that Microsoft was going to go D3D if for no other reason than to foist Talisman off on the world if they didn’t take action, so they proposed to make a “Talismanified” version of OpenGL called Fahrenheit.
“Jay was probably hedging his bets for Talisman by trying to get it injected into every 3D platform he could. It’s hard for me to imagine how SGI agreed to go along with the Fahrenheit idea unless some desperation and/or kibitzing between the SGI OGL team and MSFT OGL team was taking place. Recall that SGI announced that they were dumping IRIX in favor of Windows NT during that period. I don’t know exactly what happened there… I just know that Paul Maritz was closely involved with the SGI negotiations over all of that stuff.
“They think it was an effort to merge D3D and OpenGL which it was definitely NOT, the only point of junction from Microsoft’s point of view was to inject Talisman into BOTH.”
Torborg left Microsoft around that time, before the ultimate cancellation of Fahrenheit, whose main relevance to this story is the fact that initially Seamus Blackley was brought in to work on it.
Pandora was an internal project to create a DVR capable dedicated version of Windows with a remote-controlled TV-style interface, no keyboard and no mouse. According to Jay Torborg, who worked on Pandora, “It had a full DVR. It had a cable interface for channel selection. It had the ability to play PC games. You could view your photo items. You could also browse the web, but that wasn’t the intended aspect of it. It was really more about things that you would normally do in the living room. It was about having Windows, and it was all about the UI.”
Time and effort was dedicated to Pandora, but it never was released. In that distinction, it was not alone.
WebTV
Then there was WebTV, the ex-3DO team that was acquired by Microsoft in April 1997 for $425 million. Their goal was to create a set-top box for browsing the Internet from a TV in the living room. As Developer Relations Group member Jason Robar describes it, “it was supposed to be web for your grandma. A real simple box that’s going to let you browse on your TV.”
Robar describes an experiment he and Alex St. John performed. “Alex got one of those WebTV boxes and he said, ‘Let’s try to browse your average website on your television.’ But the problem was that you would be sitting 10 feet from a 30 inch television. It was difficult to read, at best. “Televisions weren’t high definition, and it was kind of a chicken and the egg problem. Most websites wouldn’t author for that type of environment until there was an installed base, and there’s not an installed base because most websites can’t be read that way,” says Robar.
But the WebTV team didn’t just go away. They began to view position themselves around games by including a proprietary 3D chip set. And eventually, they came head-to-head with the proto-xBox team. “There were all kinds of rival groups all trying to put a box of some kind with Microsoft operating system APIs in the consumer living room,” adds Robar.
One of my personal points of career pride was having started the Zone and being a source of a bunch of the talent that went on to do great things and also led the charge in Microsoft’s thinking about online gaming.
-Jon Grande
Late in 1994, Jon Grande wrote a proposal in which he suggested a way to create a Microsoft game presence on the Internet. At the time, the Microsoft Network (MSN) was following AOL’s “walled garden” approach with its proprietary client model, but Grande and his colleagues thought that was the wrong approach. “We all were strong advocates of building games directly for the internet. Our Trojan horse approach to go after doing that was this wild idea I had where I basically wrote a proposal that went up the food chain. It wasn’t supposed to go to Gates originally. I think it was supposed to go to Bruce Jacobson, and it ended up that he forwarded it to Patty and Patty <Stoneseifer> forwarded it to Bill, and it came back down. So we essentially got head count to hire six people and a million dollars to help developers put their games up on MSN.”
The Zone was a great incubator for talented people whose careers were on an upward trajectory. Laura Fryer, one of the first people hired, went on to help run the Advanced Technology Group with Seamus Blackley, and at the time of this writing is heading up Epic Games’ Seattle studios. Shannon Loftis stayed in the Microsoft Games Group for years and at the time of this writing is a general manager for one of the Xbox One groups. Michael Mott, a senior planner on the Zone, went on to become COO for Microsoft’s president Don Mattrick until he left. And the Zone itself had a lasting impact, according to Grande. “The Zone was the first effort at Microsoft that touched online gaming at all, and the Zone kind of split in half, and half of it became part of the nucleus of the early thinking of Xbox Live, and the other half of it went on to become MSN Games.”