In advance of the upcoming CES event, John O’Rourke, who was the head of marketing for Xbox, says that they had been working on a “Behind the Xbox” exposé story—16-20-pages of pictures of the console, pictures of the prototypes, interviews with J Allard, Ed Fries and Robbie Bach. “Obviously we had a longer lead time, so we had a confidentiality agreement with them that they wouldn’t put this on the newsstand until after we announce the name and what it looked like at CES. What we came to discover is that someone at the printer had pulled one of the copies off the run, scanned it, and posted it to the internet about four days before the CES event. So, David Hufford comes into my office and says, “I think we have a problem.” He showed me the site, and you could see it coming up, page by page, full scans of everything. I’m thinking, “This is terrible! Our surprise is gone.
Bill Gates and “The Rock” presenting Xbox at CES.
“It turns out, that it was this incredible blessing because it ended up giving us about two or three news cycles around the announcement. This fed that frenzy of people that wanted to know what this thing was and what was happening at CES. We had to remain quiet because we were under embargo and we couldn’t really comment on it, but others were talking about it left and right, taking different points of view on it. When Bill actually announced it at CES we got a whole other cycle of news, and that’s when we got to come in on the conversation, also pulling in our third party partners to talk about it. It turned out to be one of the greatest marketing tactics that we ever fell into.”
Gates and “The Rock”
Bill Gates took to the stage on January 6, 2001 at CES in Las Vegas. This time he was joined by professional wrestler and soon-to-be actor Dwayne Johnson—better known as The Rock—and they teamed up to unveil the real Xbox console for the first time. The previous year Gates had announced Xbox at GDC, but this was the first time the public saw the actual console, not the Silver X prototype. This time, it was the real thing.
In between some banter between Gates and The Rock (who was essentially on loan from THQ to help promote their upcoming WWF Raw game on Xbox), they managed to show some prerelease versions of Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee and Argonaut’s Malice, while pitching WWF Raw* and another upcoming game, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2x from Activision.
O’Rourke credits David Hufford, “a brilliant PR strategist,” for organizing The Rock’s appearance. “He was central to the launch of the announcement of Xbox at CES when we had The Rock there. He was incredibly young and always passionate about the gaming space, and he played a huge role in working with The Rock and the WWF to put together the script between the 6’4” The Rock and the 5’10” 150-pound Bill Gates.”
O’Rourke notes that early feedback for Munch was very positive.
*WWF Raw was not a launch title, but came out in February 2002. Hufford later became the head of Xbox PR.
http://www.gamesfirst.com/articles/releases/xbox_unveiled_at_ces_2000.htm
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