Bill Gates personally revealed the Xbox to the world at the Game Developers Conference on March 10, 2000. This marked the first time Gates had appeared at GDC, which made a statement in itself. It meant that the top gun at Microsoft was into games. Well, he wasn’t into games like Stephen Spielberg, who was an avid player, but for the first time game developers saw that Bill Gates understood their importance enough to step on stage and make this announcement.
Among those who joined Gates on stage was Seamus Blackley, who demoed the new machine, represented by the big Silver X. To Blackley it was a terrifying moment, the culmination of two years of dreaming and anxiety, meetings, conflict, and ultimate redemption. And this was the moment of truth. “We had one of them in the back, and I think Kevin was lying down behind it getting ready to switch it to another one if it crashed. He was lying under the stage with his hand on a switch. And I’m thinking that everyone I will ever work with, or will ever to get a job from or will ever get money from is watching right now.”
Bill Gates and Seamus Blackley demoing the Silver X prototype at GDC.
There was one big surprise for some of the developers. Not everybody had gotten the memo about the CPU. When Gates described the new system, Rob Wyatt was among many who had been working on the system who was completely (in recognition of Wyatt’s Scottish background) gobsmacked. “The demo we showed on the GDC stage was our hardware on the AMD-based PCs. When Bill announced the Xbox, and he was like, ‘These are the specs. It’s an Intel Pentium processor, blah blah blah at this speed…’ We’re like, Fine… What? Tell them it’s AMD.’ That’s when they switched it and we’d not been told.” Of course, only a very select few people knew about the last-minute CPU switch; otherwise, the event continued without any obvious hitches.
Simultaneous events took place in London with J Allard and in Tokyo with Rick Thompson doing the unveiling.
London Launch with J
Marketing lead John O’Rourke was in London with Allard and tells a story that he says, “perhaps knocked four or five years of my life off.” The night before the event they were in the Hemple Hotel in London, down in the basement, trying to rewire the Xbox prototype—the Silver X—with a soldering gun.
“J and I had done an afternoon of meetings, and we were going to do the pitch and the demo the next morning for a big press conference. I said let’s meet after dinner and we’ll walk through the pitch and the demo. He brought up the Xbox and plugged it in. We heard a little sound, and nothing went on. We quickly realized that J had not switched over the power from 110 volts to 220 volts. We’d fried the power supply.
“We quickly jumped on the phone, found a small PC shop that happened to have the right power supply or that we believed to have the right power supply—he had three or four different ones. We told him to bring all of them, and he came over at about nine o’clock that night.* We took two that we believed were going to work, and then had to find the tools and a soldering iron to connect this new power supply to the Xbox, which we did. We taped it all together, said a prayer that it was going to work, and it did. It was the only box we had. We didn’t have a backup.” At the time, there were only four Silver X prototypes. They had one, Gates had two in the States, and Thompson had one in Japan.
* According to J Allard, the guy rode from Surrey to downtown London on a scooter to deliver the power supplies.
After the Reveal
Soon after the Xbox reveal at GDC, Microsoft consummated the deal to purchase Bungie Studios for $30 million. They continued the marketing of Xbox by showing at the Consumer Electronics Show and later, at E3 that year. At E3, they finally offered a release date and a price-point of $299. With a half a billion dollar advertising budget, they built demo kiosks, ran TV spots, and purchased print ads in the lead-up to the launch. They also began to show teasers of the early titles, such as Halo, Project Gotham Racing, Munch’s Oddysey, Malice, and other games, while giving hints about online gaming to come.
Word travelled fast, as even the Des Moines Register had a story about the Xbox reveal at GDC.
