Meanwhile, following the Valentine’s Day “go forth and make a console” directive from Gates and Ballmer, the scramble to complete the project moved into high gear, but it soon lost one of its leaders.
Rick Thompson left the company 31 days after Xbox got the green light. “My basis for leaving was that I did not want to work on a project that never contemplated making money. My comment was, ‘It’s against my religion.’ Nobody really held that against me. The separation was amicable, sort of like if you going to be a naysayer on this thing, and say I don’t want to work for four years on Xbox and lose $1.2 billion, you have a good reason to be gone. So I left and I went to work for a dot com in Seattle.”
With Thompson’s exit, new leadership was needed. Robbie Bach was chosen to be the project’s overall leader, Todd Holmdahl headed up the hardware division’s efforts, J Allard remained focused on the software, and Ed Fries got busy shoring up their launch title lineup.
Building the Hardware
Building a brand-new, state-of-the-art game console system from scratch in less than two years is, as Holmdahl says, with classic understatement, “not a lot of time to build a piece of hardware.” Certainly, the small Xbox hardware team, which numbered between 12 and 15 people, faced big challenges. For instance, they didn’t have their GPU (Graphics Processor Unit) locked in until March 2000. “And then it was just a scramble to get it done with that group of people at the time.”
They did get help. Intel and NVidia offered significant support for the motherboard design, and Flextronics helped with the mechanical design and did all the system testing. In fact, according to Holmdahl, the project went pretty smoothly, in stark contrast with the approval process that had preceded it.
The Xbox Hardware Team.
“We had Greg Gibson and Rick Vingerelli. There were three double Es (EE) on the team—me and Greg and Leo (Del Castillo). We were doing the system work, essentially putting everything together and architecting it. We had Harjeet Singh later on, and he helped quite a bit. Rick Vingerelli was in charge of manufacturing, so he worked to make sure the box was manufacturable and did a lot of the deals. Desmond Koval was a workhorse.
The learning curve was steep, but some elements of the project were less challenging than others. “The general architecture was pretty straightforward,” says Holmdahl. “We were basically creating a computer that runs the best DirectX-based GPU that you could find at the time and just having it be dedicated to running video games.” But a project of this magnitude is never easy, and there were numerous challenges, such as the sheer complexity of dealing with so many parts and component vendors.
Working on the custom GPU with NVidia presented its own set of challenges. “We got the first chip back, and it didn’t work that well. We tried to get the best we could out of it. The second chip came back really late in the cycle. I think we replaced all the dev kits out there with these new kits so that the game developers had real hardware. It was super late in the cycle, and they were modifying their games with the new kits.”
“I think the system engineering wasn’t dramatic,” says Holmdahl, “but the complexity of testing everything and bringing it all together was. We had never worked with anything like a DVD drive, and having that not work… you effectively had to brute force it. We had to apply as much time and energy… as many people as we had. And the top two people, Leo Del Castillo and myself, applied it to the DVD drive to try to get that fixed. So yeah, I learned a lot in a short period of time about getting systems together, getting people and a number of different companies together… organizing that and getting them to work together to meet a certain set of deliverables, and learned a lot about negotiating the deals that it takes to make something like this happen. And then I learned a lot about DVD drives and how they worked (laughs) and putting them together.”