“We were a group of developers developing tools and code for other developers.”
-Pete Isensee
Rob Wyatt remembers having lunch one day with Seamus Blackley. They were considering how they could still be part of the Xbox project, even if they had no role to play on J Allard’s team. Wyatt had worked at other companies that had their own technology groups, and while Microsoft already had Microsoft Research (MSR), the Xbox division did not have something of that sort. The idea for an Xbox technology group was not to do pure research, but to become the world’s experts on Xbox development so that they could help developers right out of the gate. “You can’t make a console without having a bunch of guys who fundamentally understand everything about the console,” says Wyatt. “So Seamus went to pull some strings. He went and did his schmoozing and it happened.”
When Blackley created the Xbox Advanced Technology Group in mid-2000, he didn’t cut corners. He went out and recruited some of the best technologists at Microsoft, including Mike Abrash, Rob Wyatt, Drew Angeloff, Mike Sartain, Chris Prince, Mike Dougherty, Mikey Wetzel, Michael Monier, Scott Posch, Mark Thomas, Pete Isensee and others. Together, they began to explore the Xbox operating system and hardware, creating sample code to share with developers and working directly with early developers to solve problems they encountered.
Shortly after forming the Xbox ATG, Blackley brought in Laura Fryer, a veteran Microsoft producer who was at the time completing the launch of Crimson Skies. While Blackley remained the ideological leader of the group, most members I’ve spoken with credit Fryer for being the practical leader and keeping everything together.
“She was one of the best managers I’ve ever had,” said Pete Isensee, “and she was somebody who understood game developers because she had done that.”
Technical artist Dave McCoy remembers being recruited into ATG because Xbox was going to have programmable shaders, which at the time were very new and advanced. After talking with Abrash about his work, he was encouraged to go talk to the ATG engineers. “There were about 16 people at the time in ATG, and the idea that you would bring in an artist or technical artist into this group seemed sort of exotic, but Seamus was like, ‘Yeah, you know what? I think we should do that because we need to explore stuff. If we’re going to build planes, we need a test pilot and we need somebody who can go talk to other pilots and go, hey, this is cool shit. You should be working on this.’ So that’s how I got involved.”
Blackley had been trying to get audio engineer Chanel Summers to join ATG, but she was happy where she was, working with Ted Hase in the DirectX group. “I had a lot of free reign, a lot of power to create my own empire, and he was basically like, ‘You run your whole thing. You set your strategy.’ It’s hard to leave that.” But after holding out for some time and sticking with the DirectX team, she realized that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work on a new console system. “And I thought, wow, a really great platform, then, is to do something great with audio within a console, and build a fantastic audio subsystem which was truly ahead of its time. So I saw this as a challenge.” She was tired of all the focus being on graphics. “You have to think about the whole package. It’s sound, it’s music, it’s design, it’s story, it’s character, it’s art, it’s graphics, and why is audio the bastard stepchild?” And so she went to Blackley and said, “Sign me up.”
As excited as she was, leaving Hase’s group was difficult. Blackley hadn’t been subtle in his attempts to recruit Summers, and Hase, who highly valued loyalty, was upset when she left. She says, “He was one of the best bosses I ever had. Hands down. He would do anything for his team, and protect them, and empower them. But it was like, you’ve got to let baby bird fly from the nest.”
ATG’s Role
Pete Isensee joined ATG at the beginning of 2001. He was a game industry veteran and developer who one day decided to change direction by applying for a job at Microsoft. “I was thinking, well, maybe I could get a job at Microsoft making games at their Microsoft Game Studios, so I sent in a resume.” Isensee ended up going through a rigorous screening process, “They gave you a lot of programming questions, and you had to write code, create graphs and do all kinds of things just to get in the door to get an interview.” He did get interviewed, however, and was hired by Laura Fryer as an engineer for ATG.
Isensee says that he initially worked on “everything but graphics.” Among his tasks was to help develop the certification process for Xbox games. He also developed a sample application that met all of Microsoft’s requirements. The certification process demanded that developers adhere to a certain list of standards. For example, they didn’t want developers to display the number of bytes that were required for saved games, but instead to use “concept blocks” to represent the amount of storage a game required.
Isensee observed that ATG was unlike most divisions in Microsoft. It didn’t make a product, it wasn’t directly building the Xbox, but they were definitely in the business of helping developers and competing against Sony and Nintendo while doing so. “We’re here to help you make the game become the best it can be on Xbox. We’re going to give you lots of source code that we’ve provided that helps get you up to speed. We’re going to visit you, talk with you, and do events. That was the role of ATG.”
ATG was in some ways, the first customer of the Xbox team. Any feature or component that was developed for Xbox was first given to ATG, which would test it and try to learn how best to use it. They would write minigames into which they would insert the code. “We would say, ‘Yep, this is going to work well. This is the way the game developer would want it,’ or say ‘No, this is not going to work; this is not going to work if they want, for example, a poll model versus an event model.’”
Explaining his example, Isensee says, “Game developers are very different and they have very different expectations than a typical Windows developer. In an event model you get information coming to you in a queue of events—a window opened, somebody clicked here—and you grab the event that is at the top of the queue. In the poll model, you actually request what is happening right now, what button is being pressed on the controller right now. ‘I don’t want to wait for it to come through after I’ve processed a hundred other events because I don’t want that latency.’”
In addition to testing components and features through minigames, ATG was writing the actual source code examples for the developer SDKs. In some cases, they would write side-by-side versions for how something might be done in Windows versus Xbox. “Another thing we would do is create a feature you can only do on Xbox and show the specific way to do it so that it is as fast as possible. It’s more of a performance, highly tuned feature. Or maybe it was a new set of APIs, like Controller. Controller was brand new. There was no such thing on Windows. So, we had a sample that showed all the things you could do with a game controller. You’d see all the inputs coming in on the screen with the controller on the screen and the buttons getting pressed in real time. We were a group of developers developing tools and code for other developers.”
In addition to developing and perfecting code, ATG’s experts were providing technical support for developers all the time. They would tell developers, “If you have any questions at all—they could be technical, they could be business, they could be anything—send them to us.” They were also diving into the hardware, working with companies like NVidia and Intel, debugging at the hardware level and writing low level code to determine if the hardware was working as it was supposed to work.
Rockstar
ATG support even extended in some cases to sending an engineer out into the field to help developers unravel sticky problems. ATG engineer and troubleshooter Mikey Wetzel, who had developed a reputation among developers for his superior DirectX sample code, such as a swimming dolphin that was a lot cooler than a spinning cube demo, tells the story of one of several exploits.
This story is about Grand Theft Auto 3, which was supposed to be a PlayStation 2 exclusive. “One of what we now call DAMs (Developer Account Managers) comes into my office and he shuts the door. He says, ‘I need to tell you something, and nobody’s allowed to know.’ Like your boss is not allowed to know. Your boss’s boss is not allowed to know.
“It turns out that Microsoft had made a deal for an Xbox version of GTA3, which is a big secret deal. The problem is that the Rockstar office in Vienna, Austria is having problems with the frame rate—severe problems, like it’s running at 13 frames a second instead of 30 or even better, 60. They are paranoid as can be, so they won’t send code over the internet or even mail disks. Worse, the game is supposed to reach the stores in a couple of months.” So Wetzel is sent to Austria to fix the problem in a hurry, no time to pack or prepare. He can’t tell his boss why he’s not going to be at work. Microsoft is going to take care of his dog at home. That’s it. He’s on a plane within a couple of hours. At the other end he’s picked up by a limo and someone asks him if he’s a rock star or something. Irony.
A Touch of the Blarney Blackley: The KnowWonder Story
Drew Angeloff tells a story about the early days of the Xbox ATG. He begins his story saying, “Seamus has this whole thing planned out, of course, because it’s Seamus.”
Then he tells the story. “We end up having a discussion with the guys from KnowWonder, and they are like, ‘Microsoft building a console? That’s ridiculous.’ But these guys had received their dev kits, and they were getting super excited about it. And Seamus says, ‘You’ve got to start using developer support. We notice that you never send in any questions.
“And they’re like, Ah, developer support is full of shit. We send questions to Sony and we get these half-assed answers back. We know better than they do. And it takes like a week to get things back.’
“And Seamus says, ‘Oh yeah? Why don’t you try asking developer support? Name a question.’
“And they figured out some technical question. ‘OK. We’ll ask this.’
“Seamus tells them, ‘Send them an email.’
“Email goes out, and of course Seamus has partially prepped this, and over in Redmond there’s somebody waiting for the email. The email comes in and they generate an answer to the question and they send it back ten minutes later. And the look on the devs’ faces is like, ‘Holy shit. Not only did they answer my email, instead of an automated response… it’s an actual human being… but they gave me an actual technical answer I didn’t know, and within a 15 or 20 minute window.’
“That was kind of the genius of Seamus. There’s a little bit of carnival trickery going on here… everybody was prepped to do this. On the other hand, he really did deliver. There actually is a real answer, and he started building the trust pipeline between developers and Microsoft. They were getting real answers that would be useful for their development. And ATG built a huge pipeline of trust with the developers. ATG developed a reputation as one hell of an organization.”
At the Rockstar offices, he’s given a computer and a quick rundown of procedures from an IT guy, but no contact with developers. He’s able to get the frame rate to 60 fps, but then the developers are so excited that they keep adding features that they had previously disabled because while trying to fix the frame rate problem, like fog or real-time lighting, which slowed down the game again. Wetzel was able to fix the game again, and ultimately it shipped on time, and according to Wetzel, it was superior to the PS2 version.
Xfest
While DRG had hosted many developer events over the years, in the fall of 2000 ATG hosted their first of many Xfests, which brought Xbox developers face-to-face with the Xbox team to learn and share knowledge and ideas specifically for the upcoming console. The idea came from Blackley, but people credit Laura Fryer for actually running the original Xfests and several that followed.
According to Wetzel, the name for Xfest was inspired by a radio station event. “Seamus really wanted to call it XXX Hardcore, and he’d laugh. He’s a funny guy,” he says. But one day when he was driving to work, he was listening to a radio station he says was called The End. “It was at the end of the dial. 107.7 The End.” The station was going to put on a festival with several bands, and they were calling it End Fest. Back at Microsoft, when Wetzel suggested the name Xfest, it caught on, and so XXX Hardcore became Xfest.
Xfest became a regular event that continues today, and many former ATG members believe that it was one of the reasons for the success of the Xbox. “One of the unique things about all the engineers at ATG was not just that they were great engineers, but that they knew how to communicate with other developers,” says Isensee. “So they had this unique combination of understanding their stuff deeply and being able to talk with someone one-on-one or being able to go to a conference and share that information. Laura spearheading those Xfest events, making sure we had the right content, great speakers, professional execution… that’s one of the biggest things that I give her credit for in addition to forming a great team. In the three or four years that she ran ATG, she hired some amazing people.”
Three images from the first Xfest:
The setup
Registering for Xfest
And finally, socializing at Xfest
Announcement for Xfest London from 2001
UK: Microsoft has revealed full details on the European Xfest Unplugged event, a one-day conference for developers targetting the Xbox hardware.
The invite-only conference, Microsoft’s first European event specifically for new developers, is targeted at producers, programmers, graphics and audio artists who are looking to develop current and future products for the Xbox hardware. The session will cover topics such as graphics programming, audio features, and online development as well as the latest technical information.
“European Xfest Unplugged is our response to the many developers who have contacted us, wanting to learn how best to maximise the transition to Xbox hardware and ultimately secure a development deal with a publisher,” said Adrian Curry, account manager, Xbox developer programs. “Xbox is a system designed from the ground up to empower developers to achieve their wildest game fantasies. We are very committed to events such as Xfest Unplugged, which will help address the huge wave of interest in the development community about Xbox and maximise the creative and financial potential of projects in development.”
The event will take place on Oct. 30 in central London. For registration details email Microsoft with “invite” in the subject line for more information. To this address… Xfest-EU@microsoft.com
Source: http://www.fgnonline.com/
Xfest Japan
Jon Thomason tells a story about the first Xfest that occurred in Japan. He was there with Laura Fryer and Seamus Blackley. Each of them gave a talk to the group, and then there was a reception.
Now it’s pretty easy to mess up humor when dealing with different cultures, and Blackley managed to do just that. “Seamus gets up and he’s trying to tell a joke,” says Thomason, “and we’d been there for many hours in the room, and honestly, it did kind of stink in the room afterwards. So Seamus was trying to tell a joke, and he was trying to say that everyone must have been really good developers because it stunk really bad of body odor in there. And the translator looked at him really weird, like, ‘Really? Am I supposed to translate that?’ And so he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And so she translates it, and there was just silence. And Laura and I were just going, ‘Oh. What did he just say?’ We couldn’t believe it. Obviously, that did not go over very well with a Japanese audience.”
The Content Design Team
There have always been support teams for technical people, for programmers. Never did anybody think about the content creators, and with the new Xbox, we really wanted to empower the people creating the content.
-Chanel Summers
Although Chanel Summers joined ATG as an audio expert, she was aware that there were many people involved in game development besides the core engineers. There were musicians, sound designers, artists—2D, 3D, graphic artists—and game designers. Just about anybody on a game development team who wasn’t writing code or tools and wasn’t in a purely managerial role, was a content creator, and Summers thought they also needed support to “and make sure that they were taking full control over the capabilities of the Xbox, because we wanted the best damn games.”
She approached Blackley and told him what she wanted to do, and he gave the thumbs up for the Xbox Content and Design Team, working as part of ATG. Summers brought in experts in all disciplines, like Scott Selfin from the DirectMusic team, and art expert Dave McCoy, and others from all of the content disciplines. Part of her purpose was to make sure that it wasn’t only the programmers who knew how to get the most out of the system. “Programmers were kind of ruling the world,’ she observed. So, by traveling the world and meeting with content developers to help them get the most out of creating for Xbox, they meant to shorten the learning curve that all consoles suffer, and bring out A+ games in the first generation.
“So it’s really funny when people go, ‘What games did you work on?’ I’m like, ‘Well I can definitely tell you that we had a hand in like pretty much all of those Xbox games that were coming out because we worked with all those content creators to do something special.’”
On the Road with Xbox
Special thanks to Kevin Bachus for supplying images from the Xbox road trip to Japan.
Once the Xbox was official because Bill Gates made it so, a serious effort to attract developers began, including road trips carrying the infamous silver X. Jon Thomason recalls these trips well. “We traveled internationally, and we had to wait for that Silver X all the time. It came through odd-sized baggage and stuff. And it would break occasionally. It was really fragile. But it was just a PC, and it was just running PC games. There was absolutely nothing there, but it was a concept and it was trying to get everybody psyched, and that was what Seamus was good at.
“The funny thing was—and Seamus won’t remember it this way at all, and I know this is my biased perspective because it’s the part that I was doing—but I really believe that the reason we got through all those talks was not just because we brought around the shiny X and because we tried to look cool, but because I and a few other people were telling a story about what we were really going to build.”
Thomason asserts that they reached developers not just with flashy promises, but with a solid plan. It was something of an uphill battle, however. “In the first meetings we did, people just laughed us out of the place. They’re like, ‘It’s going to take 3 minutes to boot. It’s going to blue screen all the time.’ When I presented in my PowerPoint, what we were actually doing, they were blown away. They couldn’t believe that Microsoft would do this. What we were doing was completely radical for Microsoft.”
The key to reaching the developers was to convince them that they were not just putting Windows in a box and calling it a console, but developing a lean, mean, from-the-ground-up operating system specifically for Xbox. “I told them how it was going to work, and how it was single process, and everything rebooted ran in kernel mode, and you rebooted between levels, and it could boot in a second, and it was going to have less than a megabyte memory footprint. We told game developers all this very early on, so I was not only committing it to the team that we were going to do it, I was also committing it externally as well.” In Alex St. John terms, they were tar babying the OS and its features to Microsoft (original reference in Game of X v.2 page 81122. “We told them the actual project plan, probably even in advance of telling our execs. I mean, we were out telling everybody what we were going to do. Really early. I mean scarily early. It was another one of those risks. We were promising the world…” For the record, the actual boot time of the original Xbox exceeded their claims by booting in .85 seconds.
One of the radical ideas that Thomason’s team had determined was that only the kernel actually resided in the Xbox, while the rest of the OS was statically linked into the game and would ship on the game disks themselves. “That was just unheard of for a Microsoft product. So, they laughed at us and mocked us when we first went in, and then I’d do my presentation and they would say, like, ‘Well, if you guys can really do this, this will be awesome,’ but they still didn’t believe it. I don’t think there was much real belief until the first Xfest where we showed real code working. They eventually did believe it, and we did ship it.”
Entertaining Japanese Visitors
American and European developers were initially skeptical, but they could be won over. But how did you reach the Japanese, who rightly saw themselves as the leaders in the console business? Kevin Bachus tells one story in which the Xbox itself doesn’t figure in at all. “We were really courting the Japanese. We’d met with them a bunch of times, and we were really trying to get them on board.”
Bachus had the idea of putting on a party just for the Japanese visitors at E3, and he found a hostess bar that was similar to the bars he’d seen in Tokyo, but this one was in Torrence, less than an hour from the convention center. “So they showed up, they’re having a great time and there’re all these hostesses dressed in like elegant cocktail dresses, and they were sitting with the Japanese guys laughing at their jokes and making them feel, like, very friendly.”
As the evening wore on, their guests started to get more and more carried away. “They started ordering all this expensive wine. Japanese folks love red wine. They’re ordering basically every bottle of red wine in the place. Robbie (Bach) shows up, and they’re stinkin’ drunk. Robbie doesn’t drink, so he basically comes and goes. ‘Hey thanks so much, really looking forward to your support, we really hope you guys come on board, see you later.’ And he is out like a flash.” And after the party, Bachus got the bill. “I think it was like $26,000. I still have it, it’s like itemized for all the wine that they drank.”
The original Xbox ATG Team.
Kagemasa Kozuki, CEO of Konami, leads a toast at a sake ceremony following the XBox Partner Meeting, March 31, 2000. In the background, Sam Furukawa (President, Microsoft Japan), Kazumi Kitaue (EVP of Global Sales & Marketing, Konami), Pat Ohura, Robbie Bach. Below: More scenes from the Microsoft booth.
Linda Inagawa, Seamus Blackley, and Kevin Bachus posing with the Silver X at Sony’s headquarters, and playing a prank by mounting the Xbox prototype on Sony’s entry.
Hirohisa “Pat” Ohura, managing director of Microsoft Japan, head of the Xbox team in Japan, speaking at an Xbox partner meeting in 2000. Right: The crazy X background used at the event.
